In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Katie Yee
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Katie Yee
Image by swords4two
Your piece, “Pennies Only,” blends the steady life of a relationship with a fantastical gumball machine. Where did the inspiration for this piece come from?
Truthfully, the finding of the gumball machine is actually completely based in real life. It was 2020, at pretty much the start of the pandemic. (Read: a totally great and safe time to bring someone’s discarded trash into your home.) My boyfriend and I had gone out to walk the dog, and when we came back, there it was: sitting in front of the building, just like that. It felt like it had been left for us somehow, so we brought it back to his apartment (and cleaned it a lot). We’ve moved twice since then, and of course it’s come with us each time. I’m staring at it now.
I guess what I mean to say is, like a lot of writers, I draw bits from my daily life and then I take a step back from reality and ask, “What’s the most fucked up thing that could happen in this scenario?” And then we go from there.
The voice for “Pennies Only” is wonderfully distinct. Your slight breaking of the fourth wall throughout the piece draws readers in and seems to include us in the gumball secret. I’m thinking of your use of “our couple” or “Look, there they are…”. Was this the original voice of your piece? Who do you imagine your narrator being?
I like the way you phrased that: the “slight breaking of the fourth wall.” You’re totally right. It’s not a break. It’s just a little crack in the fourth wall. It was indeed the original voice of the piece; I think the tone of it mirrors something like narrating the make-believe lives of your neighbors. (In a sense, the narrator could be someone peering in.)
This crack in the fourth wall is something Kelly Link does really well: she invites you in, creates this sense of intimacy with the reader. Implicates you. Catches you looking.
It has an almost fairy tale quality when she does it: the sense of a story being told. Who narrates the fairy tales? That’s who I’m imagining.
Your work has so many delightfully fun layers and fluidly includes symbolism. Are those parts that you’ve intentionally laid out as you’re writing? Or are those pieces parts that surprise you in revision, which you then tease out in editing?
Honestly, I live to be surprised with each sentence! I’m not an outliner. (I so admire people who are that organized, though!) If you’re asking specifically about the odd items that come out of the gumball machine, I can tell you that at some point in the middle of drafting, I made a long list of jarring things that could conceivably come out of it. These are the ones that just felt right when I wrote them down. Something just clicked.
In the very first draft of this story, the ending was different. (Spoiler alert!) The gumball machine doesn’t break in that first draft. Instead, smoke pours out of it and floods the rooms of their apartment, and we’re left with the image of them unable to see through the smoke but reaching towards each other. That kind of symbolism felt forced, so it had to go!
Another one of your pieces, The Carols, published in Washington Square Review, also revolves around domestic partnerships and the windows into other people’s lives that living in close quarters brings. What keeps you returning to these themes? What are some other themes you return to throughout your work?
I love to walk my dog around to the fancier blocks and peer into brownstones and form a parasocial relationship with the people who live there (if I like their books or their decor). This is an endless well to draw from! Imaginary friends are fascinating. They teach you so much about yourself. Like, maybe you didn’t know you needed a mushroom-shaped lamp until you saw it illuminating someone else’s life! Similarly, putting your characters up against other characters can reveal so much about them. Other people add surprise.
When you move in with someone—even someone you know really well—you are surprised every day by the ways in which they are not you. For instance, I am surprised constantly by the inventive places in which my partner thinks to leave his dirty socks that are, in fact, not the hamper. Surprise!
And yet—despite the socks—I would say we are generally very happy. And it’s hard to capture mostly happy couples in interesting ways. I keep returning to this theme of domestic partnership because I don’t think I’ve cracked it yet. And because I can’t imagine ever not writing about love. You’ll never get to the bottom of it! You can dig and dig and you’ll find a different weird buried treasure every time. Love, like other people, will always add surprise.
What authors helped shape the writing you do today? What are some stories or writing you return to?
Oh, I love this question! I will take any opportunity to tell people to read Aimee Bender. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is one of the most perfect short story collections that exists. She is a master at giving physicality to feeling. (In the title story, for example, a character wears grief as a stone backpack.) Other loves include Kelly Link, Karen Russell, and Ruth Ozeki—they’re each so singularly weird and gutting and wonderful. They’re my patron saints.
What else are you currently working on?
More short stories! And a little novel, too—it started as a short story but kept rolling away from me.
Photo by Roque Nonini
Katie Yee is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in No Tokens, The Believer, the Washington Square Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Triangle House, and Literary Hub. She has received fellowships from The Center for Fiction, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and Kundiman. By day, she works at the Brooklyn Museum. By night, she chips away at a collection of short stories and a novel.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Anthony Ceballos
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Anthony Ceballos
Q: One of the lines of your poem, “Glassful of Prayer,” is used as the title of Volume 26—“wreckage of once was.” Where did your own title come from? What was the impetus for you to take readers on this poem’s journey?
A: One February day, I was faced with a blank page, alone with my writerly anxiety, and all I could think was, there’s nothing there. For some reason it brought to mind a glass. What does the glass hold? Alcohol? A prayer? And what happens if we feel both have failed us in some way?
Much of what I write revolves around reconciling the devastation of addiction and alcoholism I witnessed as a child in the adults around me. In this poem’s case I was thinking of my father whose life was cut short due to his own addictions. I never had a chance to meet him. That’s a very strange fact I have trouble wrapping my head around, that I will never meet my father.
I believe he would have snapped his fingers to change his situation if he could have, as I believe anyone dealing with addiction might, but life is never that easy, and his was the worst kind of outcome. The speaker of the poem is at the beginning of a lifelong journey to avoid his father’s fate and the finalization of that age-old adage “like father, like son.”
The particular line, “wreckage of once was,” is for me everything one stands to lose or has lost to addiction, all the stupid, irresponsible things we do in the midst of our addictions. The hope is that we find a way to build something new from that wreckage.
Q: I enjoyed hearing you read your work at Water~Stone’s reading this November; I always like understanding how an author hears their own work. What is your process when practicing for a reading?
A: For me, it is a tremendous part of a poem’s creation. From the moment I write the first words, I am speaking them aloud. As a draft progresses, I will often record myself reciting it as both a rehearsal of sorts and as an editing tool. After a draft is complete, I will speak it multiple times until its voice is found. The words on the page and the auditory expression are both equally important and necessary in my writing.
Q: This story of a father’s death and alcoholism is echoed in earlier poems; “A Poem About My Hair” published in Sleet Magazine and “Shot Glass Narrative” published by Midway Journal. What new experiences do you find occur as a writer as you return to this theme? Do you think you’ll return to this theme again?
A: As I’ve gotten older, I have understood more the complexities of my father’s life situation, as well as the complexities of addiction. I suppose I’ve always been somewhat keyed into those things, being raised with alcoholism so close at hand, but certain perspectives have come only with time’s passing and further life experience. I find also as I get older my need to write with full compassion and empathy only grows stronger. Where once I might have felt merely angry, frustrated, or hurt by my father’s absence, I now feel a more intricate array of emotions, still for his absence, but also for him. I imagine he will be with me in my writing for some time to come. Oddly, I feel closer to him now than at any other point in my life.
Q: Your previous work has also dealt with colonization and resistance; you had a poem as part of Pangea World Theater’s Poetry in the Windows Placekeeping Project. What role do you see poetry playing in relation to educating and interacting with the community at large?
A: I firmly believe the creative has the potential to spark new thoughts and ideas in any viewer. With Pangea’s Placekeeping Project and what I wrote about South Minneapolis’s beloved East and West Lake Street, I like the thought of someone who might have read it recalling their own cherished memories of the great thoroughfare. There’s a profound connection in that, and an even deeper appreciation for Lake Street through that connection.
There is something about the visceral quality of poetry, the melodic, the rhythm and cadence, the rawness of an image, that hits in a way so unique to its form. If you add the experience of hearing it read aloud, just a voice and the words and the exchange that happens with an audience…in that I find possibility truly infinite. You will hear not only my story, you will hear the stories of my family, of the wicked, ongoing aftereffects of colonization and displacement on Indigenous people, how it affected my mother and her family and how I’ve carried that into my adulthood, you will hear of the cruelty of the stigmatization of addiction in this country, how it silenced my father and began to eat away at me. Most importantly: You will hear.
Q: What writers inspire you? What novels or poetry books do you read or re-read?
A: I am inspired by so many authors. I am grateful everyday to work at Birchbark Books and Native Arts in Minneapolis, Minnesota, owned by the Turtle Mountain Ojibwe writer Louise Erdrich. Over my years there, I have come across so many wonderful books and writers that I cherish to this day.
Of course anything by Louise, and anything by her wonderful sister Heid E. Erdrich, who was just named Minneapolis’s first Poet Laureate!! Tommy Orange, Kaveh Akbar, Danez Smith, Joy Harjo, Layli Long Soldier, Michael Kleber Diggs, Billy-Ray Bellcourt, Patti Smith, Lynette Reini-Grandell, Joan Didion, Sun Yung Shin, Mona Susan Power, Kao Kalia Yang…I mean we could be here for months…at least a year if we start talking about books!
Q: What are you working on now?
A: In the now-now: Answers for these wonderful questions!
In the bigger now: Assembling a manuscript, which is quite the task. It is always shifting its shape, catching me off guard with unexpected inspiration or the slow burn realization of parts no longer working. It has had at least five different titles and any number of pages. It had a photographic element at one point. It still might have a photographic element. It’s been every font and every font size. It’s been double spaced, single spaced, one and one half spaced…
I am also enjoying writing every day for the sake of writing every day, be it poetry or prose. I am doing everything I can to nurture the creative spirit in whatever form it takes, whether writing, photography, drawing, long walks, reading, etc. If I am not nurturing the creative self, then I am not whole.
Anthony Ceballos is a poet/bookseller/enthusiastic reader/ all right cook. He lives in Minneapolis and can be found penning staff recommendations at Birchbark Books & Native Arts. In 2016 he was selected to be a Loft Literary Center Mentor Series mentee. In 2022 he was part of the inaugural Indigenous Nations Poets retreat in Washington DC. He is a first-generation descendant of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Ryan Habermeyer
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Ryan Habermeyer
Your nonfiction piece, Only Matter, juxtaposes the death of a girl you knew with Lenin’s preservation. What was the impetus to blend these ideas together on the page?
It was a weird writing experience. For a very long time I tried and failed to write about my friend’s death. It’s such a core memory but I couldn’t ever figure out how to write about it, much less do it justice. There were so many different approaches, so many memories to consider, so many ideas to juggle. I meandered for years with drafts and fragments, sometimes envisioning it as a big essay and other times as a flash piece, but nothing felt right. Lots of false starts, lots of abandoned middles. As I’ve gotten older as a writer, I’ve discovered not to force a piece into what I think it ought to be but let it mature organically. I’ve learned to experiment more, to splice the bits and pieces of thought with something else. That’s the pleasure of the lyric essay. I love collage; I love white space and taking big leaps. I love wild juxtapositions of images, narrative, meditation. The trick is making the juxtaposition do interesting work that doesn’t feel contrived or arbitrary.
So, Lenin grew into this essay gradually and unexpectedly. I went down a rabbit hole on the internet and learned about Lenin’s preservation, then I read Ilya Zbarsky’s Lenin’s Embalmers, and while I was researching all that I had a random conversation about my friend’s death and there was something of an “ah ha!” moment and the two things blurred together in my mind. It was surprising and uncomfortable when I started Frankensteining this thing together. Who am I to write about Lenin? I’m not Russian. I’m no revolutionary. I’m nobody. I didn’t think it would work, honestly. In a way it’s absurd to think of my life and experiences as somehow parallel to, or perhaps a shadow of, someone as historically significant as Lenin. But I think it was Donald Barthelme who said something like those who never attempt the absurd never achieve the impossible. I think about that often when I’m writing. Especially in a piece like this where I had to learn to let it exist more conceptually than narratively, like a weird thought experiment.
I love the line, “…all lives are fables or one kind or another.” Can you expand upon that?
I love fairy tales and fables. Thanks to my mother, I had a steady diet of them in my childhood. Not the cheap Disney ones either. The dirty, gritty Grimm ones. The weird Russian ones with Baba Yaga and Koschei the Deathless. I can’t imagine living life without fairy tales as an intermediary—they’re fundamental to my consciousness, to the way I see and interact with the world. In my academic life I teach classes on them regularly, and usually when I’m stuck with writing projects my default is to turn to fairy tales for help, whether that means using a specific tale intertextually somehow, or more conceptually as an intellectual aid. I suppose you could say creating fairy tale allusions in my work is somewhat lazy because I do it so frequently, but I’m always astonished by the plasticity of folklore to shape narrative and reveal insight. Fairy tales are good to think with. They’re so dynamic. Sometimes I’ll write an outrageous line like this one and not believe it but keep it anyway because it sounds right to my ear, but I do think memory—which is something my essay interrogates—is a kind of fairy tale. There’s a lot of neuroscientific research that says memory is a ruse; that we regularly confabulate remembered reality into something that it wasn’t. Our minds spin the tales of our lives, but as storytellers we’re fudging the truth even as we’re trying to get closer to it. In English, we use the phrase “Once upon a time” to open a fairy tale, but in other traditions and cultures they begin with “Once there was and was not,” and that rings true to me of how memory works and how life is.
There’s a theme of impermanence throughout the piece. I also feel like it extends to some of your other work, both fiction and nonfiction, like LA PETIT MORT and these short stories. What draws you to that theme of blending extinction and the natural world, along with speculative elements?
It’s a concept that has certainly preoccupied me for the last few years. I think like a lot of people, I find it difficult not to be thinking about impermanence and extinction these days. Not to get all doom and gloom, but it’s omnipresent in the culture, right? The static in the background getting louder and louder. Look around. Hard to ignore the sick world we’ve created. I grew up in California and spent a lot of my childhood visiting Arizona, Nevada, Utah. I have so many memories of long drives through the Mojave, the Great Basin, the Canyonlands. Eerie and beautiful landscapes. The emptiness, the seeming nothingness, the surrealness of it all. Nobody wants to be confronted with their own impermanence, but when you live in and around the desert you get a regular dose of that reality. My wife says I’m a catastrophist (and as usual she’s right), and I suppose that curiosity towards extinction and the speculative comes to some extent from living in that environment. I’m interested in the fringe. Those places that feel like they’re on the edge of the map and about to disappear. That’s where things happen. Weird things. Real things. Where our understanding of the natural gets turned on its head. With writing, I feel like you’ve got to bend reality to understand it better. So when you’re living in a time of warped reality you’ve got to warp it even more. That’s what I’m exploring in my new collection of short stories, Salt Folk, which comes out in a few months. Speculative fictions of Utah past, present, and future. Not fatalistic meditations on extinction, necessarily, but exploring what happens to faith when the world you know falls apart.
As a teacher, what do you feel is one of the most important writing lessons you give your students?
Slow down. Both with the story itself and the writing process. Not long ago I had a student show me his marketing and merchandising plan for the eleven-part fantasy series he was writing, with descriptions of all the movie adaptations and video games and figurines that would be part of this vast multi-media empire he was creating. Problem was he hadn’t written the actual story. It only existed in his mind like a summarized Wikipedia entry. I think students would benefit from a slower writing process and not being in such a hurry to publish. Learn craft. Experiment. Figure out your voice. Figure out the kinds of stories you want to tell. There’s nothing wrong with delaying becoming a so-called official “writer.” Maybe this is just narcissism talking because I’m a slow writer. There are things I wrote six months, a year, five years ago that I’m just now figuring out. I mean, my friend died almost thirty years ago and I just now figured out how to write about it after a long and grueling process. Maybe I’m just not a very good writer who takes too long to figure out what the story wants, but there’s something to be said about waiting for the story or essay to come together on its own terms. I don’t put much stock in inspiration. I think the creative process is slow and grueling, a game of attrition. So much of what we do as writers is about being patient and just observing, waiting, tinkering, experimenting here and there, letting the memories and images and words simmer, biding our time until we can find the shape of whatever thing we’re creating. The world is already moving too fast. Don’t duplicate that on the page or with the process. Slow down. Give yourself time.
What authors shaped the writing you do today? What are some of your favorite texts?
The only writing I’m interested in these days is experimental narrative. I have little patience for conventional stories focused on plot and narrative arcs, and I cringe a little when I read a review that says something like, “I couldn’t put it down!” I’m not sure I want story anymore and all the formulaic trappings that go into that; I want an aesthetic experience. I want writing that has a vested interest in shape and style beyond the content. Because for the most part, the stories are all the same. Or at least I’ve seen some version of the story in question a thousand times before (the curse for all of us bibliophiles who read voraciously). So how a writer tells a story is much more interesting to me than what is being told. Style is substance. I want voice. I want a book that gives me pause, that makes me step away from it for a day or two. I want a book that’s difficult to digest. Isn’t that what art is supposed to do?
Some of the books I’ve read and re-read recently: Olga Tokarczuk, Flights; Benjamin Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World; Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities; Lily Hoang, Bestiary; Thomas Bernhard, The Voice Imitator; Paul la Farge, The Facts of Winter; Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet; Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House; László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance; Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid; Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars; W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn; Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory; and Maud Casey, City of Incurable Women.
What projects are you working on now?
I just finished the final edits on my second collection of short stories, Salt Folk, which comes out in a few months. I also recently completed my first novel (talk about slow: it took me more than a decade to write), which is a revisionist Pinocchio story with echoes of Don Quixote about a boy with a cosmonaut helmet surgically grafted onto his head who watches too many campy 1950s sci-fi movies and, believing he is an alien, builds a catapult in the Utah desert hoping to launch himself into outer space. Stylistically, it’s written as a series of obituaries and integrated into the text are dozens of vintage photographs from the early 20th century I collected from antique shops and flea markets—so I’m excited to get that book out into the world. I’m also slowly cobbling together a collection of essays about the American West, Things the Desert Told Me, exploring faith, fatherhood, and folklore.
Ryan Habermeyer is the author of the short-story collections Salt Folk (Cornerstone, 2024) and The Science of Lost Futures (BOA, 2018). His stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions, Alaska Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, Flyway, Cincinnati Review, Blackbird, Cimarron Review, Seneca Review, and others. He is associate professor of creative writing at Salisbury University. Find him at ryanhabermeyer.com.
A Conversation with Joan Naviyuk Kane—WSR Contributing Poetry Editor
A Conversation with Joan Naviyuk Kane—WSR Contributing Poetry Editor
Water~Stone Review is a collaborative project of students, faculty, and staff at Hamline University Creative Writing Programs. In addition to working with our faculty, and to fulfill a larger initiative of providing a place for new/emerging and underrepresented voices at Water~Stone Review, we now have rotating contributing editor
This is a wonderful opportunity for our graduate student assistant editors to collaborate with renown writers in order to expand our reach and further innovation. Past Contributing Editors include Sun Yung Shin, Keith Lesmeister, Sean Hill, Carolyn Holbrook, Mona Power, Kao Kalia Yang, and Ed Bok Lee.
In this post we introduce Vol. 27 Contributing Poetry Editor, Joan Naviyuk Kane.
Photo credit: John Utkiduaq Kane
Welcome! We’re thrilled to have you as a contributing editor for Volume 27 of Water~Stone Review. With such an expansive list of works, what is your writing process like for individual poems? And looking at the big picture, how do you architect the flow of a poetry collection or chapbook?
Often, in my process, individual poems begin with an insistent word, image, or moment that begins to inflect a line— a lyric call to the page that defies everyday, conversational speech. I try to get myself then to a stanza, and the turns of a poem. Titles, speakers, human and more-than-human subjects often come late, or later, in the process. I find myself doing a lot of spelunking around for diction: I’m especially interested in the histories of words, their original meanings, and consider myself somewhat anachronistic in turning to the Oxford English Dictionary and hardcopies of a Roget’s International Thesaurus (one that is organized according to categories of word choices, which helps lateralize and expand meanings and associations of the language that initially gets me to the page) and a rhyming dictionary, too.
Structuring a collection, whether it’s a chapbook or longer work, often begins with a desire to order my poems in such a way that the pieces I’m most wedded to for various reasons appear at the beginning and end of a manuscript and its sections, if I’m working in sections. With Dark Traffic, I was fortunate to have some exceptional readers who had signed on to work with me for the year that we were to have our collaboration hosted at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. One in particular, Patricia Liu, who is a poet of such attention and generosity, helped me jettison a lot of the things I’d originally had in the book’s early drafts.
All that said, I have a fairly arcane process for structuring collections. For various reasons, I’ve tended to subsume or obscure a lot of autobiographical details, yet work with certain narrative landmarks in my manuscripts. Sometimes I find that I want readers to map their own way through the individual poems.
As a Visiting Associate Professor at Reed College, what are some essential techniques you teach your poetry students?
Essential poetry techniques I try to impart often have to do with getting students to heighten and hone their diction, phrasing (focusing on the unit of the line), to free their poems from narrative and accessibility. I tend to ask students to consider the proximity of their speakers to the poem itself, and to encourage them to let go of intention as a way to revise and incorporate revision suggestions. I don’t insist on students obtaining the aforementioned hardcopy resources—an international thesaurus, a rhyming dictionary—or use one particular formal or prosodic craft book. But I repeat and remind them that language—not just statement—is everything.
When reading new work, what catches your attention and sparks your interest?
I’m replenished by poems that remind me of the things poems can do that prose cannot do so easily: repetitions, sonic and lyrical gestures. Poems that live outside of narrative, meaning, or the myopia of a directed audience interest me the most. Ambiguity, imagination, and the way poems can complexify emotion through thought take hold of me more than poems that give everything plainly to the reader.
What projects are you working on currently?
Well, I feel I’m just coming up for air after a series of major geographical moves in recent years alone with my children—first from Alaska to Massachusetts and then in late summer to Oregon. I’ve been collaborating on an expansive multi-genre anthology with two phenomenal co-editors that’s included a not-inconsiderable amount of travel to the arctic and subarctic (a bit tricky to do as a single parent), and working painfully on an essay collection that brings together revisions of older essays and trying to find some workable sentences, paragraphs, and coherence. I’m coming out, I think, of something of a drought of imagination and energy. My time and attention have been constrained by so many factors in recent years, not the least of which has been getting my kids through some tough stretches of time with COVID and our moves. We left a very stable life in Alaska. I’m a person who does well with routine, a lot of walking and physical activity, and a lot of time to read and research. The new poems are coming together in the background as I try to set aside longer amounts of time on my prose, including a turning back to long-abandoned fiction-writing.
Joan Naviyuk Kane is the author of several collections of poetry and prose: The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, Hyperboreal, The Straits, Milk Black Carbon, Sublingual, A Few Lines in the Manifest, Another Bright Departure, Dark Traffic, and Ex Machina. Forthcoming in 2024 is her edited anthology, Circumpolar Connections: Creative Indigenous Geographies of the Arctic, as well as an essay collection, Passing Through Danger. The Hopkins Review, The Yale Review, and The Academy of American Poets have recently featured her poetry and prose. A Guggenheim Fellow, Radcliffe Fellow, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation’s National Artist Fellow, Mellon Practitioner Fellow, and Whiting Award recipient, Kane was recently selected as a 2023-2026 Fulbright Specialist as well as the recipient of the 2023 Paul Engle Prize from the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature. Kane received her A.B. in English and American Language and Literature from Harvard University and her M.F.A. in Writing from Columbia University. Prior to her current post as Visiting Associate Professor at Reed College, Kane held faculty appointments in the departments of English at Harvard, Tufts, and UMass Boston, in the graduate creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and was the Mary Routt Endowed Chair of Creative Writing and Journalism at Scripps College in 2021. Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak (King Island) and Qawiaraq (Mary’s Igloo).
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Todd Davis
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Todd Davis
Original artwork by swords4two
Your poem, “Deposition: What Was Lost,” brings grief to the page with gentle, yet visceral, imagery, blending every other phrase with life and death. There’s a very cyclical feeling to the poem with these images. How did you find that pattern when writing this piece?
The older I get the more obvious it becomes to me that we live in many times and places at once in our perceptions of reality.
With the deaths of those I’ve lived with and loved, I find that I slip in and out of a present moment–perhaps walking a stream in the woods near my house, seeing a fox move in the undergrowth–to settle in another moment from long ago. I find the triggering points of such movement in time evocative and fertile for writing.
The cyclical nature of this poem and its images feels organic to me, feels closer to the way I experience existence. The more-than-human natural world is rooted in cycles, and I’m more content when I follow those cycles than when I get lost in the pressures and stresses of the notion that time is linear. I love how the moon is present and affects so much of our existence, how sunlight grows and diminishes through the year, how where I live growing seasons lead to the harvest, lead to dormancy, and eventually to rebirth.
As for the images, they come from different moments in my life. When I think of my mother, and her descent into dementia, they serve as holding places of love in the moment of that loss.
The spacing of the poem seems to invite watching it flow across the page, and brings to mind the dripping honey on the last few lines. What was the impetus to space this poem in the way you did?
I like very much your description of the lines as appearing as dripping honey!
With most of my poems I try a range of forms. Anything from a single stanza to multiple stanzas of similar or exact length.
I also play with lineation, which might lead to a very thin, short line or to the explosion of the line, the erasure of which creates a prose poem, a form I like to work with.
This poem felt like it needed breathing room, space for the deep and ragged breath of grief, moments to stop or pause, to take in and remember.
Speaking of honey, that seems to be a recurring theme in your work; one of your published poetry collections is titled “Coffin Honey.” What draws you to this subject, or image? What other themes do you use throughout your work?
The simplest answer is that I love honey. I have two big mugs of tea each day with heaping spoonfuls of local wildflower honey.
In other poems, I’ve written about my great aunt Alverdia Davis who was born in 1887 and died in 1984. She kept bees and would take a metal wash basin and a wooden spoon and drum out a song that would lead a swarm back to the hive.
I’m interested in the intelligence of all animals, of all beings. The collective work of bees, the importance of their work as pollinators, and the gift of honey, simply leaves me awestruck.
You teach environmental studies, and in an interview with Speaking of Marvels, you talk about how working with your veterinarian father as he recited poetry led you to both a passion for writing and nature. Does poetry find a place in your classroom in any way?
My father’s love of poetry is undoubtedly the reason I started writing poetry. And, yes, I bring poetry into every class I teach. I want poetry to be something that is part of my students’ everyday life and experience. And I try to write poems that most anyone can enter. I like to think of my ideal audience as my Appalachian grandparents who had very little formal education but who loved the sound of language and played with words and story all the time.
As someone who studied literature, and Thoreau in particular, I was excited to hear that you’ve written a chapbook called Household of Water, Moon & Snow: The Thoreau Poems. What was your process in writing that book, and in balancing research versus creativity?
More than 30 years ago, during my doctoral studies I, too, studied Thoreau and many of the writers that comprise the American Renaissance and in particular the Transcendentalists. I was especially drawn to Thoreau because of his deep love for the natural world. Emerson, for instance, seemed to “use” the natural world for his higher spiritual purposes. Thoreau, especially in his later work, seemed to take nature on its own terms.
A moment in Walden that has stuck with me is the winter scene in which Thoreau tries to measure the depth of the pond. On the mountain just to the west of our house is a pond I visit throughout the year. One winter I snowshoed back to it after a heavy storm. The woods were white and glistening and the voice in my head was not my own. The pond is spring-fed and where the ice thinned because of that constant flow I threw a larger stone to break the ice. A poem began at that moment, with the descent of that stone, but it was a persona poem, which later I understood was in Thoreau’s voice.
From that single poem grew a chapbook of persona poems or biographical poems about Thoreau in the third-person. As I worked on them, I enjoyed reading back through Thoreau’s writing, as well as various biographies of Thoreau’s life. I used some of that factual information to begin poems, but I always gave my imagination the freedom to explore the possibilities of Thoreau’s interior life.
These poems were published in Household of Water, Moon, & Snow (Seven Kitchens Press, 2010), but they also serve as the middle section of my book In the Kingdom of the Ditch (Michigan State University Press, 2013).
Where do you find inspiration? What authors do you keep returning to?
The workings of the more-than-human natural world always inspire me. I’m endlessly interested in the other beings who share the planet with us, who make our very lives possible. There’s a black bear that’s been following me through most of my books, and in Coffin Honey this bear I call Ursus took on a significant and recurring role in the stories of that book.
I’m also inspired by and tend to write about those humans who are neglected or who are treated unjustly. Working class folks are my rootstock. I come from poor, subsistence farmers and grew up in a Rust Belt factory town. I’ve always lived in the Rust Belt, and for the past 21 years my home has been in the shadow of an Appalachian railroad town, in the mountains where coal mining and other extractive industries have left a very damaged landscape that’s slowly healing and rewilding. It’s that landscape and those people who inspire me most and are featured in many of my poems.
As for authors, there are so many, but I’ll try to name a few. I read a great deal of fiction and also always have a book of poems I’m working through.
Here are some authors and titles that I return to often: Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Once Upon a River; Ron Rash’s Something Rich and Strange; Sherman Alexie’s The Toughest Indian in the World; Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union; Rick Bass’s Where the Sea Used to Be; Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares; Donika Kelly’s Bestiary; Robert Wrigley’s Earthly Meditations; Geffrey Davis’s Revising the Storm; Jim Harrison’s The Woman Lit By Fireflies; Jane Hirshfield’s After; Dan Gerber’s Particles; Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude; Charles Wright’s Appalachia; Adrian Matejka’s The Big Smoke; Camille Dungy’s Trophic Cascade; David Hinton’s translations of many classical Chinese poets; and anything by David James Duncan. I love his most recent and long awaited novel, Sun House.
And there are so many more writers I return to, but these are folks I find myself reading and re-reading the past few years.
You are the author of seven books of poetry. What else are you working on?
I’m working on three books at the moment. I’m editing A Literary Field Guide to Northern Appalachia, which is a companion volume to A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia. The University of Georgia Press will publish this book in September 2024. I’ve been busy writing and compiling the poems for my next book of poetry, Tributary: New & Selected Poems. And the third manuscript is a prose book of linked essays about being a father and a son and how those relationships have been shaped by particular moments in the woods and on the water, especially in connection to native, wild fish like the brook trout.
Todd Davis is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Coffin Honey and Native Species, both published by Michigan State University Press. He has won the Midwest Book Award, the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Bronze and Silver Awards, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, and the Bloomsburg University Book Prize. His poems appear in such journals and magazines as Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Missouri Review, North American Review, Orion, Southern Humanities Review, and Western Humanities Review. He teaches environmental studies at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.