In The Field—Conversations With Our Contributors: J. D. Debris
In The Field—Conversations With Our Contributors: J. D. Debris
Your poem, “Song of Solomon” in Volume 26, brings to life vivid images. What sparked the creation of this piece?
Appreciate that comment. The poem takes its title from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, as well as her novel’s biblical namesake, both of which did pretty well for themselves in terms of character and story. That freed me up to write something fully lyric—to not stress over narrative and go all in for the incantatory. So, it wasn’t so much about bringing images to life as it was singing them to life. Just trusting the logic of The Song—that mythic, inexplicable, titular thing—even as I put it on the examining table and dissected it.
The poem is in couplets, and many of the lines land on a word or phrase that only gets completed with the next line, so the reader switches images in the middle. What is your process when crafting a piece like this—how do you find the breaks? Do those cliffhangers come as you write, or are they edited in later?
Yeah, you’re onto it, couplets and cliffhangers: the enjambment is a direct result of the form. You could probably reverse-engineer those line breaks, but that’s—no shade—a more free-verse way of thinking, whereas I’m constantly, as a half-musician, framing my thinking via form.
Since I gravitate toward simple forms—in this case, AA BB rhyming couplets—pushing against the constraints of such forms is a must. The form of this poem is as predictable as it gets—you know exactly where the rhymes are going to hit, and, like Derek Walcott said about the ocean, its meter never changes—so the challenge is decalcifying the couplets, decentering them, imbuing them with a little bit of the shimmer, the weirdness, of being alive.
With enjambment, you’re embodying astonishment in the text. That’s what, in poetry as in fiction, suspense does, or should aim to do: to put into words (and into the spaces between the words) a moment-to-moment uncertainty. That way, we might capture a fraction, a flash, of consciousness, and what it feels like to have it.
What themes do you find that you return to in your work?
Bravery and cowardice, certainty and doubt.
You are also a musician. What was your instrument of choice? How does your knowledge of music influence your poetry, and vice versa?
Years ago, Yusef Komunyakaa asked me, Have you ever tried singing your poems? That question clicked on a light for me, though it took me a while to figure out. But when I heard Arthur Flowers read his work to the hypnotic beat of the Array Mbira, that gave me a model to emulate. I basically owe my whole performance style to Arthur Flowers.
Now, when I perform, I cross poetry and live instrumentation, accompanying myself on guitar and alternating between speaking and singing. Since my stuff is jazzy and adaptable, I love to bring other musicians into the mix whenever possible.
To be honest, I’ve heard some cornball shit that fits the above description. So I just do my best to make it sound smooth, and not fussy or dusty whatsoever, and to keep the faith that the role of the griot, or the lyric poet (i.e. poet with a lyre), or however you want to refer to a poet shameless enough to think he can sing, is as relevant as ever.
What stories or texts inspire you? What authors helped shape the writer you are today?
Two formative experiences from my teens. One: my younger sister (the best reader I know) handing me her copy of Yusef Komunyakaa’s Neon Vernacular and telling me You Need To Read This Right Now. And two: stumbling on Roberto Bolaño’s The Romantic Dogs in the public library.
One of the many upsides of reading Komunyakaa and Bolaño young was that, through their allusions and bibliomanias, I wound up with whole constellations of writers and artists to check out. A truant, angry, autodidactic, mutt-ass misfit couldn’t have asked for a better syllabus. Through those two books, I found my way to Vallejo, Césaire, Cortázar, and Mingus.
Now, if you’ll allow me a brief indulgence in dorkiness, I’d like to shine a light on some other writers slotting (roughly) into my parents’ generation, some—but not all—of the literary aunts and uncles who’ve been formative to me, whom I hope to do right by:
John Edgar Wideman, Jay Wright, Lyonel Trouillot, Marcia Douglas, Marcial Gala, Derek Walcott, Kathleen Collins, George Elliot Clarke, Ai, Percival Everett, Adonis, Lynda Hull, Dambudzo Marechera, Franketiénne, Cornelius Eady, Larry Levis, Oscar Hijuelos, Ni Kuang, Gil Scott-Heron, Joy Harjo, Patrick Chamoiseau.
You can divide every generation of young writers into two camps: those who want to burn down everything their parents’ generation did (always easier—and faster—to burn books than it is to read them) and those who want to build on it. I’m old at heart—not in the sentimental way, in the arteriosclerotic way—and as such, I’m ten toes in the latter camp.
What writing or projects are you working on now?
Novels, ya heard? Voice-driven shit. Trying to smuggle poetry into fiction the way many of my heroes have. That, plus getting back into the mic booth ASAP.
J. D. Debris is the author of The Scorpion’s Question Mark (Autumn House Press, 2023) winner of the 2022 Donald Justice Prize. His work has received fellowships and awards from New York University, DISQUIET, Narrative, and Ploughshares.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—A. K. Herman
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—A. K. Herman
Your story, “Love,” which appears in Volume 26 of Water~Stone, is a chapter of a longer work. What inspired this piece? Where does this chapter fall in the story? What made you choose this section to share with us?
“Love” is inspired by the generations of powerful matriarchs in my family, women from Tobago, Trinidad, Africa, India, who presided over people, places, and things. I grew up with women like this and heard stories about my grandmothers and great grandmother all my life. In “Love” I focus on rural Tobago in the post WWII period. There is a prevailing idea that people in rural settings, black and brown women, people without large sums of money are without power. Power is everywhere, even among those thought to be on the periphery. In much of my writing I show that power operates in ways people don’t expect.
I’m working on a historical novel told from three different points of view across three generations. As I write this, “Love” is the first chapter in the last section, where we visit the past, and meet Beatrice, who started it all.
What made me choose to share? I was workshopping a novel chapter and the workshop lead suggested I publish it as a novel excerpt, as it was able to stand on its own. I was also encouraged because other writers in the workshop liked the piece and were curious about my characters.
It wouldn’t have occurred to me to publish the excerpt, as the novel was in early stages. The leader of the workshop shared published novel excerpts by prominent authors and basically said—You can do this too. You’re just as good. I want to stress here the importance of having a community. I submitted the chapter excerpt with the support of a community.
There are complicated relationships in this piece—between Betty and Ann; Betty and Leo; and even between Betty and the women she works with. What draws you to write about these tense relationships?
“Love” is written from Betty’s point of view, and because of who she is—beautiful, grand, bold, superstitious, pretentious—she’ll have what many might describe as a ‘tense” relationship with many people. On the other hand, from Betty’s point of view, these relationships are not tense at all. This is how she is in the world. It’s natural, normal for her to interact with the other washerwomen this way. Except for a few fleeting moments, Betty is hardly concerned about how her actions affect others.
In most societies, women especially, are raised to be likable. This cultural value is so powerful that in writing workshops, other writers, no matter their demographic, have an immediate, viscerally negative response to female characters who don’t seek to be liked. This makes me want to laugh and cry. I laugh as not even writers, those charged with holding a mirror up our society so we may see it more clearly, can escape biased cultural values. I cry for the same reason.
I write about these kinds of relationships because I’ve witnessed really complex relationships between people, where the truth is stranger than any fiction I’ve read. I think that most relationships are complex, once you get beyond the surface. Two people love each other, but there is a seed of jealousy growing between them. Two people loathe each other, yet have much in common. There is inherent conflict in complexity, necessary for good storytelling.
Your characters are distinct and true to themselves. What is your goal when crafting and developing characters? What made you choose first person point of view over third?
Since I was writing a novel, I created a character profile for Betty, so I could begin to understand her. I did the usual stuff about her appearance, age, what she does for a living, key relationships etc. I also added details about her beliefs and her negative traits, as this is the source of conflict, the driving force of narrative. Notice that I said ‘begin to understand,’ because I understand characters as I write the story. For most of my short stories there is no advance character profile. It is through writing that I get to understand a character, so much so, that sometimes they surprise me.
I chose first person because I want to get to the core of the characters, see them in the raw. My characters (spoiler) have tons of secrets and do some outrageous stuff—adultery, lies, threatening to put curses on others—to get what they want, so they must entrust the reader with their innermost thoughts, without judgment. First person was also important as I sought to understand what motivates my characters to do the things they do. Third person was too distant from the characters’ inner selves. In “Love,” the challenge was to write in first person and craft a tale, where the reader can imagine, with some certainty, the world beyond the main character’s point of view. Betty gives her version of events, but there are hints in conversation, setting, pauses, that suggest the world isn’t quite as Betty sees it.
This story is set in 1926. How much research went into this piece?
I collect oral histories from my family about how people lived in the recent and distant past, especially the way people spoke, dressed, cooked, and religious and medicinal practices. At the Heritage Library in Scarborough, Tobago, I researched maps, word use, and cultural practices in Tobago. Thanks to the librarians there, who were knowledgeable, kind and thoughtful. I have visited the National Archives in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, to read newspapers from the early 20th century to get a feel for everyday life. Also a great experience with the amazing team there. I’m reading books on Tobago, watching videos on linguistics and ethnomusicology. Lots of research. The real work was knowing tons of details then becoming Betty, a woman living in 1926, who knows and understands the world she’s in but doesn’t need to explain it.
You’ve been published in Shenandoah, Doek!, and other magazines. What have been some challenges—whether exciting or difficult—that you have had while working on a novel, and how does that differ from writing shorter stories?
There are characters or events that occur in the novel’s world that don’t form part of the main story. It’s exciting to explore these characters or parallel stories from the novel through short stories or poetry. These literary escapades, as I call them, keep me prickly with anticipation to understand new characters, new settings. They’re short enough for me to explore an idea or feeling. But, they can be distracting too. I sometimes write short stories from various points of view to explore voice and polish and polish before I think it’s ready for other eyes. I can’t do this with a novel, so it’s a change in writing practice for me. My friend and fellow writer, Mubanga Kalimamukwento, who has published novels and poetry collections, said something that has helped to chasten this tendency. I wrote it on a Post-it and put it above my writing desk: The first draft is garbage. Utter garbage.
What themes do you find that you return to when you write?
Love. I believe all acts are born of love. Love of self. Love of a person. Money. Power.
Interpersonal relationships. I want to understand the nature of people and why we are the way we are to each other, to ourselves.
Spiritual and religious beliefs. How do our beliefs shape us?
Caribbean people, their beliefs and customs.
The unseen. The unheard. The unimaginable.
The periphery. There’s a singer on stage, bathed in a perfect round spotlight that shows the contours of her face and makes her dress glitter like a starry sky over a forest. I want to understand the person who aims the spotlight at the singer.
You write fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. How does writing in one genre inform the others?
I like telling stories, so no matter what I write, there’s narrative there. My poems are often prose poems or some…work that I can’t really name. Imagery in my prose is vivid, strong, like poetry. I describe my imagery as “indigenous” to the characters and the setting in a story or poem. This makes for interesting, inventive imagery that isn’t created by me, but by the story I’m telling. At times, I’m surprised by the imagery and literally end up having to agree with it after it’s written, as in… “yeah, I could see how character X might describe a sunset that way.”
What authors inspire you? What texts do you return to?
How much space do we have? Lol!
I’ve read, re-read, and I’m inspired by V. S. Naipaul, Jeet Thayil, Chinua Achebe, Homer (The Odyssey), Octavia Butler, Derek Walcott, Anthony Doerr, Ursula Le Guin, I Ching, J. R. R. Tolkein, Ryszard Kapuściński, Zadie Smith, The Bible. Salman Rushdie, and more. All for different reasons. The prose. Format. Style. Characters. World building. Imagery. Audacity.
I admire Narcopolis, a novel written by poet, Jeet Thayil. Anything written by Ryszard Kapuściński. The spareness, you know. Things Fall Apart still commands my attention. Walcott’s imagery is indigenous to the Caribbean and I admire it greatly. I own most of his collections and read them when I’m unable to write. The Silmarillion is excellent world building.
This is what I’m feeling right now. At this time and place. Ask me next month and the list will likely be different.
What else are you working on now?
I’m working on a group of poems, based on the world of my novel (it’s an illness with no cure, apparently). I am also in the midst of the novel, from which “Love” is a chapter. I’m making progress ‘cause the draft is quite rubbish. Ha!
A. K. HERMAN is a Caribbean poet and fiction writer, born in Scarborough, Tobago. She has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and her writing has appeared in Doek! Literary Journal, Lolwe, The Water~Stone Review, Shenandoah Literary Journal, and others. A. K.’s debut story collection, The Believers: Stories, will be published in Fall 2024. A. K. lives in New York.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Dan Albergotti
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Dan Albergotti
Your poem, “On the Third Stanza of a Poem by F. S. Key,” blends today’s history of the last election with the beginning of our country. What caused you to weave these two events together? What brought Key’s song to the forefront of your mind?
I can’t recall exactly when it was, but I remember being surprised to learn that Francis Scott Key’s poem/song “The Defense of Fort M’Henry” was written not at the very beginning of the United States, but about three decades into the nation’s history, during the War of 1812. He composed it to the tune of a popular drinking song, “To Anacreon in Heaven,” and now we sing the first stanza of his poem to that tune and call it “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I think it’s really poignant that our national anthem presents not an assertion of confidence or certainty, but a timid question about the country’s existence. “Tell me—does that flag still wave?” it asks. “Or have we been defeated?” That was an immediately urgent question for Key; he wrote the poem less than a month after the British had sacked Washington, burning the President’s home and the Capitol. But the viability of this audacious American experiment in democracy is always tenuous, so the question is always relevant.
About 24 years after Key wrote his poem, a young lawyer named Abraham Lincoln gave a speech in which he asserted that no foreign power could ever destroy America, but that it could be destroyed by forces from within—forces that do not respect its laws, courts, and institutions. “As a nation of freemen,” said Lincoln, “we must live through all time or die by suicide.” I thought about all of this on January 6, 2021.
Ever since I first learned of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmic Calendar,” I’ve been a bit obsessed with long-range perspective. In that piece, Sagan scales everything we know of time—via astronomy, geology, etc.—down to a single calendar year. On that scale, the Big Bang occurs at the first second of January 1 and the birth of Jesus of Nazareth occurs at 12:59:56pm on December 31. So from a cosmic perspective all of what we call “A.D.” has taken up only the last four seconds of a year. (That will teach you some humility!) “Ancient history” begins to feel not so ancient. Sometimes it feels nearly contemporaneous. While to some it might feel like a stretch to think of Francis Scott Key in relation to January 6 and our fractious political present, to me it feels perfectly natural. “Do we still exist, or are we dying by suicide?”
We sing the first stanza of Key’s poem at sporting events and graduations, and the words feel innocuously patriotic. But the final three stanzas have some fairly gruesome stuff in them. That’s especially true of stanza three. Early in 2021, I wrote a series of three poems, one on each of these final stanzas. My formal challenge for each poem was to include as many words from Key’s stanza as I could. In addition to the phrases that I explicitly quote in this poem published in Water~Stone Review, I also lift the following words from Key’s third stanza: band, swore, havoc, war, battle, country, confusion, blood, wash, footsteps, foul, pollution, home.
This all feels like a too-long answer to your question. Apologies for rambling!
This brief scene with the porter and the children leaves a lasting impression. What made you choose this scene particularly to include? What scenes were you thinking of adding that you left out?
Well, that scene is something that I actually witnessed. I was in Washington in early 2022, and I saw this happen outside the hotel where I was staying. A bus pulled up, and a group of children who all appeared to be between the ages of 8 and 12—all of them wearing red “Trump 2024” hats and all of them, of course, lily white—exited and filed straight into the hotel, guided by their parents. An older African-American man held the door open for them. I couldn’t shake that scene from my mind. So when you say that the scene in the poem “leaves a lasting impression,” it makes me feel like I perhaps succeeded in conveying the power of the moment from life to page. I hope so.
But to your question of why I “chose” to include it in the poem, I have to say that when I’m writing I’m never very conscious of making deliberate decisions about what to include and what to leave out. It’s a much more intuitive process than that. I remember an interview with a poet—it may have been Jack Gilbert—who said “I want to think the way poetry thinks” (or something to that effect). That’s what I want too. To let the poem lead me to associations and connections, and not to be in complete control of where things go. Robert Frost says, “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” It’s hard to surprise yourself if you don’t relinquish a good bit of control in the process.
You address the reader directly from the sixth stanza to the end. What was the driving force to include us in that manner?
I honestly don’t know. Maybe it comes from an urge to connect and find camaraderie with others in our shared predicament. Clearly the speaker is specifically reaching out to other Americans, those who know the first stanza of Key’s poem “by heart.” As if to say, “Hey, you can see this too, right? You and I are in the same boat here, facing something really dire.”
Maybe it’s equally an urge to confront fellow Americans who don’t think January 6 was a significant crisis, to shake complacent people by the shoulders in our fraught political moment. Robert Frost (again!) says that poetry is “a way of taking life by the throat.” And sometimes poems can take the reader by the throat and say, “Listen! This is important!”
Of course, believing that a poem could ever shake anyone out of complacency might be foolish. But recognizing that does little to quell the urge. Especially these days.
You utilize internal rhyme within this piece—”war,” “door,” “floor.” When you craft poetry, what sort of intentionality do you find yourself using with rhyme? When do you strive to leave it in, and do you ever work to remove it?
I’m sure I wasn’t deliberately thinking about incorporating rhyme in this poem. But that doesn’t mean I’m not pleased to find it there. Such occasional internal rhymes in a free verse poem are often evidence that the poet’s ear was alive to the sonic pleasures and possibilities of language. The only reason I’d ever revise to remove rhymes is if upon reading the poem aloud I thought they created an awkward sound or suggested a too-self-conscious “poetic flourish” (that is, as if the poet was reaching for rhyme for its own sake).
And, for the record, I write in both formal and free verse, so I don’t see any innate virtue in removing rhyme from a poem. I know that some people see formal verse as an outdated mode only employed by politically retrograde “traditionalists,” but I very much disagree with that view. I think there’s still a place for rhyme and meter in the 21st century.
Do you find that you often write about political topics in your writing? What other themes do you return to?
I think there’s always been a certain political strain in my work, but it seems to have become more pronounced since November of 2016 for some reason. Enough said about that.
I also think that poems are often “political” without being “about political topics.” In his book How to Read a Poem, Edward Hirsch says, “The poet wants justice. The poet wants art. In poetry there can’t be one without the other.” I’ve always loved that, how it suggests that aesthetic concerns are inextricably—even if mysteriously—linked to political ones, to the questions of what’s right and what’s wrong. Poetry demands that readers think and feel deeply, and you’ve got to believe that if we think and feel deeply we’ll advocate for the best, the most just, policies for everyone. A lot of politicians (all too many) encourage people not to think and feel deeply. Many these days encourage them not to think at all. Maybe that’s one reason politicians of a certain wing frequently vote to cut funding for the arts and for education.
Are there books or authors that inspire or delight you? What are some of your favorites? You’ve written several poetry collections, including The Boatloads (BOA Editions), Millennial Teeth (Southern Illinois University Press), Of Air and Earth (Unicorn Press). What do you focus on when creating poetry collections? What are you writing now?
There are far too many books and authors to list in response to the first part of your question. I’ll offer that John Keats is my all-time favorite poet, and Jack Gilbert is my favorite American poet. Gilbert’s The Great Fires is a touchstone for me.
I couldn’t begin to name the poets writing today who inspire and delight me. I’d give you 20 names and then be chagrined to realize I’d forgotten to mention 20 other obvious choices the day after this interview appeared. Suffice it to say that it’s a great time for American poetry. Iron sharpening iron, as the saying goes.
As to the latter part of your question, I only assemble poetry collections after the poems have been written. I never have a book-length project in mind beforehand. So I’m always just “writing poems,” trying to “honor my obsessions,” as Natasha Trethewey advises. That usually results in a body of work that can be arranged meaningfully in a book manuscript.
My third full-length collection, Candy, has just been published by LSU Press:
Thank you for your questions and your interest in my work.
Dan Albergotti is the author of The Boatlads (BOA Editions, 2008) and Millennial Teeth (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), as well as the chapbooks Of Air and Earth and Circa MMXX (Unicorn Press, 2019 and 2022, respectively). His third full-length collection, Candy, is forthcoming from LSU Press in fall 2024. His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, The Southern Review, The Best American Poetry, and Pushcart Prize, as well as other journals and anthologies. He is a professor of English at Coastal Carolina University.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Jax Connelly
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Jax Connelly
Your nonfiction piece “Not So Soft,” which appears in Volume 26, weaves running, sisterhood, eating disorders, and loss together. Your work is uniquely descriptive—“The ground is violent with leaves,” and “I was a pressure cooker of a teenager.” When and how did this piece first spring into existence? How long did it take you to write and develop the precise language you use?
I didn’t know this essay was about sisterhood or even, necessarily, eating disorders until several drafts and months in. I wouldn’t have come up with lines like “the ground is violent with leaves” or “I was a pressure cooker of a teenager” until I had submerged myself in the themes of the piece and started developing a more intentional recurring image system related to food, the body, types of harm, the things we try to bury, etc.
This piece takes place while the speaker is on a jog—cycling through concentration on the task at hand in these loops of thoughts and memories. It’s a very clever way to be able to naturally return to themes throughout the work. What inspired you to write with this conceit, and at what point in the process did this become realized?
This piece originated in a travel writing class I took in fall 2020 (an ironic time for a travel writing class; it took place on Zoom, of course). At a time when we couldn’t travel in the traditional sense, our professor (shoutout to Patty McNair) used an exercise called “the writer’s road trip” to encourage us to rethink what “travel” could mean—i.e., a walk around the block, a trip to the grocery store. The exercise provided a structure for narrative movement based within a relatively short, ordinary trip that the narrator takes alone: 15 steps that switched off between “on the road” steps and “pull over” steps. “On the road” steps were about moving the story and journey forward through the external landscape, while “pull over” steps were about deepening the narrative through memory, reflection, and new understandings. The “conceit” is that the exterior landscape evolves as the narrator moves through it, and time passes which allows the narrator to move around their interior landscape, too.
I feel like the weather plays a character in this story. What was your process of developing weather in relation to the human characters?
Nothing has the ability to piss me off more reliably than the weather. It’s this natural (though it sometimes feels supernatural) force that we have to arrange so much of our lives around, and we have absolutely no control over it. We’re just at its mercy, period. And I don’t know if I made this connection while I was writing the essay, but now that you’re pointing out how prominently the weather features, I’m realizing that’s kind of what it’s like to be inside an eating disorder. A lot of people think eating disorders are about body image, but in my experience they’re actually about control. You start using these behaviors and you’re thinking “this is how I will achieve total control over myself and my life.” And then one day you wake up and you realize you’ve been completely swallowed.
You utilize beautiful repetition throughout your work, not only here, but in other pieces like The Spectacular Years, published in Hunger Mountain Review. What is the role that you feel repetition plays in your writing?
In “Not So Soft,” I think the overlaps in the transitions between the paragraphs are a technique for mimicking the rhythm and cyclical nature of being on a run, especially a run along the same route you’ve run a million times before.
In “The Spectacular Years,” I think the repetition is functioning more in relationship to the way memory and, especially, writing about the past can simultaneously expand our understanding of what’s happened and obscure it. I’m fascinated by the fallibility of memory, and the way that fallibility interacts with the act of writing something down, especially writing something down that we believe to be “true.” Every time I go back and try to tell a story, whether a true story or not, I’m changing it slightly, not because I was lying then or I’m lying now, but because I’m seeing it from a different vantage point, and noticing something I either didn’t notice before or wasn’t ready to acknowledge. There’s a lot of hand wringing around what constitutes the ultimate, singular, capital-T “Truth” in creative nonfiction. But memory feels true, even when it’s false. We can interrogate that on the page, but we will never be able to figure out the ultimate, singular, capital-T “Truth” of our lives. I don’t believe truth exists in such a singular form. The truth is always plural, partial, multi-sided, fragmentary. Contradictory, even.
That, I think, is why repetition interests me in general—it’s this very cool craft way to insist upon constant reimaginings and multiple truths.
For me as a fiction writer, approaching nonfiction feels very vulnerable, yet you’ve cultivated a frank, open style. What draws you to nonfiction? How do you decide what pieces of yourself you share with the audience, and which you don’t?
I think it’s all coming from the same place, really. I don’t think my process is all that different from a fiction writer’s. The more I write, the less married I am to the label of “nonfiction,” and at the same time I feel almost protective of it as a genre, because a lot of people, when they hear “creative nonfiction,” get confused—if it’s “nonfiction,” how can it be “creative”? Don’t those words cancel each other out? But nonfiction isn’t just glorified diary keeping: “This happened and then this happened and then this happened.” Whether we’re writing fiction or nonfiction or something in between, we’re all always shaping the story, and we’re always making decisions about how much of ourselves to share in that story. That requires leaving a whole lot of stuff out. It requires picking and choosing and pulling things apart and rearranging them very carefully, playing some things up, others down. Whatever happened, there are a million ways to write it. I know I’ll never get it exactly, precisely right, but I think there is something uniquely powerful about applying literary and poetic techniques to the “facts” of your own life, using them to scrutinize and question the various “truths” you’ve had to swallow, and also uncover the ones which have maybe always been lurking underneath the surface.
(As a sidebar that’s more related to my own thoughts above than your original question, I will add that I believe this question of “truths” is also inextricably intertwined with queerness and transness, because part of what writing does, for me, is retroactive work to both stabilize and destabilize the liminalities inherent in queer and trans bodies and intimacies. Writing is an embodied act in itself, right? So we’re living in these bodies and we’re also writing in these bodies, about things that have happened while we’ve been living in these bodies. I think if we understand “true stories” as perhaps a broader, more complicated space than “This happened and then this happened and then this happened,” we might feel freer to abandon the idea of the fixed and static frame typically associated with capital-T “Truth,” and let ourselves fall deeper into the shiftingness that is necessary, not threatening, to the “integrity” of a queer and trans “I.” Especially a queer and trans “I” that creates.)
What themes do you keep returning to in your writing?
Unstable bodies, mental illness, queer and trans experiences, family trauma, the fallibility of memory, unreliable narration, “truth” in all its forms, liminal relationships, relational ruptures, constructions of language, and, importantly, my dog.
Do you have favorite books that have influenced your writing? What authors do you return to?
My Body is a Book of Rules, Elissa Washuta’s first essay collection, was hugely influential on me back before I even started writing, as was Wendy C. Ortiz’s memoir Excavation. I’ve read Problems by Jade Sharma more times than probably any other book. The work of T. Fleischmann for a masterclass on the book-length essay. The anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, especially the work of Ari Banias, Oliver Bendorf, and Dawn Lundy Martin, for new ways of thinking about trans bodies in relation to bodies of text. We the Animals by Justin Torres is probably the book I recommend most often. Kiese Laymon’s memoir Heavy should be required reading for all. Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, Melissa Febos, Jenny Boully, Maggie Nelson, Alexander Chee, Michelle Tea, and Eileen Myles are a few of the authors I return to again and again. A few books I loved recently: Post-Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson, The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison, and Manywhere by Morgan Thomas.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on a book-length braided essay that investigates forgiveness and cycles of abuse, and I’m trying to balance that by taking regular breaks to work on very short flash essays that have nothing to do with those topics. And I’ve got new stuff coming out soon in Off Assignment, Slag Glass City, and The Georgia Review.
Jax Connelly (they/she) is an award-winning writer whose creative nonfiction explores the intersections of queer identity, unstable bodies, and mental illness. Their essays have received honors including three Notables in the Best American Essays series, Nowhere Magazine’s Fall 2020 Travel Writing Prize, first place in the 2019 Prairie Schooner Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest, and the 2018 Pinch Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction, among others.You can read more of her work in Fourth Genre, [PANK], The Rumpus, Hunger Mountain, Ruminate, Pleiades, and online at jaxconnelly.wixsite.com/writer
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Elise Paschen
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Elise Paschen
Your poem, “Divination,” is a gorgeous blend of imagery, myth, and spring welcoming. Where did the spark for this poem come from?
Thank you! During the pandemic, our family moved to a house in rural southwest Michigan. Spending days in isolation, I became fascinated by the birds outdoors. In another poem in this series, “Skywriting,” I describe living in our house as if in an aviary. When I drafted “Divination,” I had been inspired by the image of robins festooning a tree in the cold of winter. I then continued the trajectory of my beguilement by imagining the emptied nests around our house inhabited in spring.
I love the cascading effect of the lines. With layered poetry like this, I’m always curious if there’s another way this poem can, or is intended, to be read? How did you craft this format?
While working on “Divination,” I also was writing a long poem, “Heritage,” which employed a similar staggered stanza structure. In the past I’ve written contrapuntal poems which can be read vertically or horizontally. This one functions more as a concrete poem, mimicking spatially the robins on the branches. Behind the poem’s structure lies this notion of threes, inspired by a sense of divinity in nature.
So much of your work delves into the themes of relationships and nature. What draws you to these themes?
Throughout my life I’ve had an ineffable relationship with the natural world, a place which offers inspiration and sustenance. During our time of isolation, I rooted more deeply into realms outside the human one.
Your poems have the qualities of stories. What is your writing process? When you set out to write a poem, do you have a narrative, or do you work from imagery?
I try to catch the impulse of the poem when it arrives, allowing the music to carry its own momentum. I often will write the first draft quickly and then continue redrafting the original version. Poems have been inspired by many things—history, dreams, art, film, myth, memory, emotion, the natural world, to name a few. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on William Butler Yeats’s revisions of his female persona poems, and I am a relentless reviser. When working on a poem, I hope that the language will help to determine its particular direction. I also endeavor to surprise myself while writing—so, much of the time, I don’t know where the poem will travel.
Over these past years I’ve envisioned writing a book-length project. My previous books have been assembled through accretion, poem by poem. With my new book, “Blood Wolf Moon,” I’ve attempted to create a narrative which engages the reader from beginning to end. Within the dramatic propulsion of the narrative there is an intrinsic architecture, a sense of plot or even a five-act structure.
A new writing preoccupation is to create sequences of poems, in which one poem will lead to the composition of the next. As I had mentioned, “Blood Wolf Moon” opens with a long poem called “Heritage,” composed of hanging indent stanzas. The last line of the first poem becomes the first line of the next, creating a crown of fourteen poems. There are several other series in the book, including the avian poems and a botanic suite, which I’ve broken up and scattered throughout. In part four of the book, I’ve taken earlier prose fragments and created a prose poem memoir sequence.
Poetry is, in a way, a language unto itself. And you’ve written work that incorporates the Osage Nation’s language, including “́/Waléze/Stationery” and “͘ ́ ́/Máze Htáhtaze/Typewriter.” Can you talk about what your process is like when working with multiple languages in your writing?
I have always been fascinated by the Osage language. On my desk are two Osage dictionaries, the older one compiled by Francis La Flesche and the newer one by Carolyn Quintero. The La Flesche dictionary helped my work on a poem called “Wi-gi-e,” which is spoken by Mollie Burkhart whose family was systematically murdered during the Reign of Terror (1921-1926) in Oklahoma. A line from that poem, “During Xtha-cka Zhi-ga Tse-the, the Killer of the Flowers Moon,” helped to inspire the title for David Grann’s book and Martin Scorsese’s film, “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
While working on “Blood Wolf Moon,” I began delving into Quintero’s dictionary. In “́/Waléze/Stationery” and “͘ ́ ́/Máze Htáhtaze/Typewriter,” I chose words in the dictionary at the end of the alphabet and worked my way forward. With regard to this process, I see the words in translation and the poem arises, tapping my past, my dream life, my unconscious, offering unexpected discoveries. Esther Belin accepted these poems for her special issue on Land Acknowledgment for “Poetry” Magazine. Right after the acceptance, I became aware of the creation of Osage orthography by the Osage Nation. Christopher Cote from the Osage Nation Language Department provided the translations in orthography for the poems.
Where do you draw inspiration from in your life? What authors or works inspire you?
I love balancing my work as a writer with my work as an anthologist. Reading and discovering poems by others continues to fuel my own writing. My most recent anthology, “The Eloquent Poem,” is based on writing workshops I’ve taught in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As I teach that anthology this semester, I continue to rediscover new aspects of the poems we study. How I love, for instance, Kimiko Hahn’s collage poem, “Things I Am Beginning to Forget.” Next week we’ll discuss January Gill O’Neil’s “Bloom,” along with other mirror poems. The book includes artist statements at the back, so you can learn from the poets (as well as from my general introductions) how to write an ekphrastic poem or an aubade or an ars poetica, for instance.
I’m a founding board member of Indigenous Nations Poets, and we’re talking to my editor, Gabriel Fried, about editing another Persea anthology comprised of poems by our In-Na-Po Fellows and Board members. The work of these writers continues to amaze me, and I can’t wait to get started on this project.
I look for inspiration in all the poems I encounter. I was struck by how Rowan Ricardo Phillips’ first and final poem in “Silver” mirror each other in reverse. I’ve written a couple of mirror poems but had never thought to begin and end a collection with one. Reading Monica Youn’s “Detail of the Rice Chest,” helped jumpstart a recent new poem. Joy Harjo’s “An American Sunrise” inspired the trajectory of “Blood Wolf Moon.” Another favorite is Timothy Donnelly’s “Chariot”—a multi-faceted jewel of a poetry collection. I look forward to reading Sophie Cabot Black’s collection, “Geometry of the Restless Herd,” and Kenzie Allen’s “Cloud Missives,” among many other books coming out soon.
You have authored several poetry collections, The Nightlife, Bestiaries, and Infidelities, among numerous other works. What project is at your fingertips now?
I just brought out a chapbook, titled “Tallchief,” (Magic City Books Press, 2023), a selection of poems from my first three books as well as new poems, inspired by my mother, the prima ballerina Maria Tallchief. She is featured on the US quarter, and her Osage name is represented in Osage orthography. When I was working with the US Mint on helping to choose the design for the coin, the Osage Nation Language Department suggested the Mint incorporate the orthography —hence my own realization of the need to include orthography in the Osage translation poems.
“Blood Wolf Moon” will be published by Red Hen Press in April 2025. The poet Rachel DeWoskin, after reading the manuscript, wrote a beautiful long email. Here’s an excerpt: “There are constellations all the way throughout, stars and birds and light and darkness and beauty and horror and nature and humans and history – multiple languages, bloodlines, meter.” I’m grateful to Rachel for these words.
Photo by Beowulf Sheehan
Elise Paschen is the author of six poetry collections, including The Nightlife and Blood Wolf Moon, forthcoming in spring 2025. Her poems have been published widely, including The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, and The Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. She has edited or co-edited numerous anthologies, including The Eloquent Poem and The New York Times bestseller, Poetry Speaks. Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.