In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Sheila McMullin

Your poem “Thank You” blends the telling of past histories and the present conflict in a relationship, as well as imaginative statements. What was your inspiration for this poem? What was your process for blending history and imagination?

“Thank You” comes from my epic inner battle about how we write about personal histories as though everyone, unilaterally, has clean, verified access to them. I’m constantly stumped by how to speak honestly about something I feel I should know more or better about—my own family history, the inner workings of my brain. The medicine of writing this poem, for me, was to try to get to a point where that not-knowing isn’t perceived as a personal failure, when the not-knowing is often the result of systemic, often colonial, forces. With “Thank You,” the aim was to acknowledge that the stories I do have about family, my place in it, and how these experiences have shaped my decisions are stories made up of feelings as much as facts, shaped by the complexity of inheritance and the silence that sometimes protects, sometimes estranges.

In this poem, imagination is a method of self-permission. The spectrum runs from: what if I had access to everything I needed to know—a fantasy in itself—to what if I accepted that not knowing is its own kind of truth? Especially as someone who identifies as mixed-race, I’ve learned from community that liminality isn’t an obstacle—it’s a soft architecture. Ambiguity isn’t a problem to solve.

The poem establishes that there’s danger in not inheriting legibility and danger in seeking it. So, I want to ask, who is clarity for? Who is legibility for? And how do we gently hold the evolution of self-understanding to be better/responsible/more understanding toward those who come next in our lineage? 

One section of the poem speaks to my search for legibility. Earlier in my mother’s academic career, she wrote an article on being an “ambiguously brown” academic called “Beyond Lip Service” in the anthology Mentoring Faculty of Color. I’m struck by her language of “ancestral clarity” and the perceived requisite to achieve it within white society. Achievement is a type of currency as is becoming legible. This in and of itself is a blending of history and imagination. Perhaps “Thank You” was seeded in this article, and now, this is another way we keep evolving our ancestral clarity. 

 After each section, you have a statement that a percentage of the previous section was true; “50% of this is true,” for example. The percentages vary. Tell us about how this part of the poem developed.

The percentages emerged as a way to interrupt my (and therefore the reader’s) certainty. Thinking back on it, in an uncanny turn of events, the speaker became the most certain of the bunch. Why do we believe the speaker? Do I believe the speaker? Does belief depend on what type of truth I understand her to be qualifying; emotional, factual, artistic? Which parts are the true parts? If it’s not true, then is it automatically false? “Truth” seems to be something constantly renegotiated. “True” maybe is striving to be the revolving light in the lighthouse. The percentages can become a signal that what’s being shared lives somewhere between memory, fantasy, fear, and desire. Even when we feel we’re being deeply honest, in the form of storytelling—especially in confessional storytelling—we are still shaped by omission, pressure, self-protection. 

I wonder when narrative instability makes the reader too uncomfortable to continue believing and when narrative clarity functions for the reader (and for myself) like the emotional caregiving as referenced in the poem. By naming the truth as understood, does the poem acknowledge the instability of that truth? Where can the beauty of language help to stabilize the reader to give the writer greater permission to play with ambiguity or difficult subjects? I’ve been learning about this from Ta-Nehisi Coates. 

And then, even after all this theorizing and exploring, what if I’ve still gotten it wrong? What was there to get wrong in the first place? Does getting it wrong negate the feeling that shaped it, or the experience of living it or not living it? The constant questioning and doubting gets annoying. 

In all this unknowing and destabilization, the medicine in the wound is that we always get to redefine and evolve. We can live the lifecycle of a plant again and again, each time stepping into what is being asked of us. Today, I am the leaf, yesterday I was the bloom, tomorrow I am the roots, and again I am the compost.

The end of the poem is a plea for a relationship. Can you talk about that within the framing of the poem?

Thank you for helping me gain greater insight into my poem! This question transports me to the moment I was generating the poem, and yes, I was making a plea for a relationship, wasn’t I? Although at the time, I think, I was trying to verbalize all the things that I felt were my fault but I wasn’t responsible for. Isn’t that why we’re all born screaming? Calling out for another to witness our hurt and help to soothe it?

Another way I understand the poem’s ending is as a conceit for wanting an accounting that we are unlikely to get at this moment. It’s a call to acknowledge what we need to be responsible for, who we need to be responsible for, and understand that no one thing or solution is coming to save us. We’re going to be the ones who protect us and make meaning of our lives.

In the same way the statements play with the meaning of “true,” the ending plays with concepts of choice. I want to still choose you. I want you to still choose me. Not because someone did the math—but because we decided it matters.

What prompted the title, “Thank You?”

Short answer: Adventure Time season three, episode seventeen—it’s one of my favorites and it’s titled Thank You. I saw it and thought, “Hey, that’s a cool title.”

Highlights from the deeper answer: It’s also a framework I’ve been working with—thank you as offering, as resistance, as daily practice, and as a kind of semi-autobiography. It shares a title with other poems in the manuscript including one about environment harm and injustice that was published by Air/Light Magazine. The manuscript’s working title is also Thank You.

What themes do you return to in your writing?

Recently, infertility and how to write about medical experiences, and environmental and intergenerational care.

What texts inspire you? Who are some of your favorite authors?

Do gardens count as text? They really inspire me these days. And compost too. I love the metaphor of compost–the catapulting into decay and fertile renewal. My dear friend, community poet, and children’s book author Michelle Andrea Bracken inspires me and reminds me of the importance of why we write for intergenerational knowledge. I’m celebrating the life and work of Andrea Gibson. The lectures of Michael Meade who “looks at culture through a mythic perspective” have been a north star. I regularly return to Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, Diane Wilson’s The Seed Keeper, John Francis’s The Ragged Edge of Silence, and Rumi’s and William Blake’s works. Sarah Vap’s End of the Sentimental Journey is a stalwart. She is forever among my favorite authors–I understand my writing as a descendent in her lineage. JoAnn Balingit’s work has helped me access writing on my Filipino heritage. Joan Kane’s, who was the contributing poetry editor for volume 27, lyricism teaches me how the heart and mind always have greater capacity for expansion than we may have previously thought possible. 

And new to me is the mind-bending and heart-stretching work of Stargazer Li, who pulls lessons from the stars and “rehydrates language.” Stargazer Li goes deep into etymology and lore and reminds us that the path to our thinking is often embedded into these early meanings. If we can spend the time building relationships with language on this level, we know ourselves more deeply and how culture has twisted itself into its current context. I remember to fall in love with language through Stargazer Li’s lectures and rehydrations. 

And those also with important places in my heart are Mary Oliver, Chiwan Choi, Ross Gay, CA Conrad, Lauren Groff, Ursula K. LeGuin, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Mita Mahato, and on and on and on.

What are you currently working on?

I’m currently sending out my poetry manuscript Thank You (wish me luck!) and am venturing into fiction. I’ve been playing in the romance genre through a story about a couple trying to conceive, reimagining what a happily ever after can look like—one that I think the Trying To Conceive (TTC) community may appreciate.

Thank you so much for spending time with my work and words!

Sheila McMullin is a poet, writing coach, and community gardener. She is the author of daughterrarium from Cleveland State University Poetry Center and proud co-editor of Humans of Ballou and The Day Tajon Got Shot, both written by teen authors and published by Shout Mouse Press. She teaches nature writing classes with Los Angeles County Department of Parks and Recreation and sits on the board of the Contemporary Irish Arts Center of Los Angeles. She holds her MFA from George Mason University. For more, visit www.sheilamcmullin.com.