1. Tell us about your poems in Volume 21, “To Shade a Green We Say a Noun” and “O Pie of Grace.” How did they come to be?

“To Shade a Green We Say a Noun”: I was frustrated with sea-green, forest-green, mint-green. There are so many greens! Description is so hard! I thought I’d experiment with different nouns in front of green. What new colors and concerns might emerge? Could I describe, discover, distinguish more fine shades of color? It was just after New Year’s, and I’d resolved to work on description.

“O Pie of Grace”: Recipes are so picky; I wanted to argue with them. As a friend I frequently cook with says while we’re putting together fruit, butter, and sugar, “How bad could it be?”

2. What excites you as a writer? What turns you off, makes you turn away or stop reading a piece of writing?

One test: Is it more interesting to look out the window than it is to read the poem, story, essay, novel? Of course, this may be more about what’s out the window than what’s on the page, but my backyard tree and the weather are always interesting to look at. So how long can I stay on the page without suddenly needing to look up? Apologies: that’s an apples-to-oranges answer. But otherwise my answer’s the same as you’ll hear everywhere: I want surprise and sound and a balance of mystery and clarity. And to learn new things. Also, I really love sentences, so I look for interestingly formed ones.

3. What was an early experience that led to you becoming a writer?

Poems that were read to me when I was little: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Counting-Out Rhyme”: “Silver bark of beech, and sallow / Bark of yellow birch and yellow / Twig of willow.” And Walter de la Mare’s “Silver”: “Slowly, silently, now the moon…” In both poems, I loved how the sound created the image, and in “Counting-Out Rhyme,” how the poem was made of a list of trees, and then the poem seemed to become the trees you could see and say in your mind.

4. How does the current political climate influence your art or creative process?

I’m so angry and depressed about what’s happening in this country that all my old concerns seem irrelevant, and my new ones, well, other voices do it better. So I’m doing a lot of scribbling and journal writing and trying to figure out what my writing is in this place. I’m excited to be reading a lot of the urgent voices being published now.

5. What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work? Do–or have–you had any mentors in your writing life?

One of my mentors was my aunt, who was a painter, biologist, botanist, birdwatcher, chef, hiker, adventurer, conversationalist, gardener, tea-drinker and letter-writer. She studied Zen with Suzuki Roshi, was one of the early residents at Tassajara Zen Center in California, and then studied Chinese brush painting. Her lifelong project was to use the Chinese brush to paint the plants, animals, and landscapes of Los Padres, Big Sur, and the Marin coast. It’s not like she guided or commented on my writing, but her letters to me have always been a big influence, full of description of her hiking adventures, sunsets, meals, conversations, gardening tales. The way she was, the way she observed things, the way she practiced painting, repeating a brushstroke a hundred times a day, deciding which one was best, trying to do more just like that, and then going with paper and ink into the woods, in one movement on the page, flash the brush across to make a branch. Her bay trees blowing in the wind are on the wall by my left shoulder.

Visit Molly’s website here, and purchase her latest book, Mytheria (Two Sylvias Press, 2017) here.

1. Tell us about your poem, “Dream Rematerialized in Bangladesh,” in Volume 21. How did it come to be?

I really did have a dream in which long threads that extended from my mother’s tongue were stitched through my fingertips. She spoke, my hands typed. I was her marionette. When I woke up, I thought, what a useful image. For many months, I’d been attempting to write a poem about my family’s relationship with the garment industry. The dream image gave me what I needed to enter the world of the poem.

The second half of the poem is taken from an experience I had during a research trip to Dhaka, Bangladesh. There I interviewed garment workers, mostly women, who told me stories about their work in Dhaka garment factories. I always sensed a gap between what I said in English, what the workers replied in Bangla and what the translators told me in English –– until the interview I wrote about in the poem.

2. What excites you as a writer? What turns you off, makes you turn away or stop reading a piece of writing?

I’ve learned to be a patient reader because writing that bugs me usually ends up teaching me something new about what writing can do. It’s a bit like the experience of learning to read in a foreign language. What makes no sense at first ends up expanding my fluency as a reader and writer.

3. What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work? Do–or have–you had any mentors in your writing life?

My current poetry project is inspired by several authors but I keep going back these specific books for help: Muriel Rukeyser‘s The Book of the Dead; Seam by Tarfia Faizullah; Bao Phi‘s Thousand Star Hotel; Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders; Daniel Borzutzky‘s The Performance of Being Human and Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith. These books use inventive language and great heart to create politically charged historical and personal narratives that shout out to the present. They read like verse plays.

4. Do you practice any other art forms? If so, do these influence your writing and/or creative process?

Before I took writing seriously, I was an animator. For 20 years I made experimental animated films and worked on commercials and children’s TV shows. I chose animation because it was an interdisciplinary art form that integrated my love of theater, dance, drawing, painting and music. I tend to approach writing as animation made with words, a call and response to other art forms.

5. What projects or pieces are you working on right now?

I’m currently immersed in a poetry project about the garment industry propelled by the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse. When the Rana Plaza building fell to the ground in Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing over 1,134 Bangladeshi garment workers in 5 garment factories and injuring thousands more, I took it personally. I come from a family of NYC garment workers who made a living in garment factories during the time of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (NYC, 1911) that killed 146 immigrant garment workers, any of whom could have been one of my relatives. The poems I’m writing animate the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire and the Rana Plaza collapse; bring to light my present day connections with garment workers in Bangladesh and reflect on my role as an American consumer in the fast fashion supply chain.

A group of these poems were originally written as part of a multi-media installation made in collaboration with visual artist Rachel Breen and exhibited at Carlton College’s Perlman Museum and the Sabes Jewish Community Center in 2018.

Photos from reading of Alison’s poems during the Price of Our Clothes exhibit at the Perlman Museum. Artwork by Rachel Breen. Poems by Alison Morse. First photo reader: Sara Paller.

Visit Alison’s website here and follow her on Facebook here.

1. Tell us about your poems, “The Very Short Story of Your Knuckles” and “After the Man Who Found Me Doing Burpees at the Park Said: “I Can Tell You Learned Those on the Inside.”,” in Volume 21. How did they come to be?

“After the Man Who Found Me Doing Burpees at the Park Said: “I Can Tell You Learned Those on the Inside,”” began in a workshop led by Marcus Wicker, who was in Mankato for the Good Thunder Reading Series. The experience it’s based off is true. I’d sort of forgotten about it. Rather, I hadn’t thought it was much for a poem until Wicker’s workshop where I realized what the man said had remained, quite vibrant, in my mind.

“The Very Short Story of Your Knuckles” was a poem I couldn’t write for years because I needed it to be “perfect.” It became more of a responsibility than anything else. After multiple failed drafts, I shelved it. Years later, while teaching, I wrote on the board “The Very Short Story of Your ________” as a freewrite prompt for my students. I decided to jot some lines myself. It was only after class, that I realized what I’d written felt closer to that very poem I failed at writing for so long. Coming at it from a different angle and without all that pressure to write towards perfection allowed me to discover what the poem itself needed.

2. What excites you as a writer? What turns you off, makes you turn away or stop reading a piece of writing?

Vagueness and untethered abstraction tend to be my writing-turn-offs. Like many writers I know, I love a surprising yet somehow fitting line or image. Those surprises end up being the moments I find myself recalling long after I’ve read the poem.

3. What was an early experience that led to you becoming a writer?

My sister Rose leant me her copy of Luis J. Rodriguez’s memoir, Always Running, when I was fifteen or sixteen and had stopped caring about school because, among other reasons, the books I was assigned didn’t include characters who looked, spoke or lived like me. Those years, I spent most nights spray-painting walls all over town. The memoir deals with identity and manhood as a Mexican-American man. Graffiti symbolized my own struggles with who I was. In Rodriguez’s work, I saw myself. That’s when I realized that being a writer was not only a possibility for me, but that what I had to say could mean something to someone.

4. What are some themes/topics that are important to your writing?

I’m so very interested in masculinity, identity and loyalties. I grew up in a very macho culture. All car parts and boxing gloves under a southern California sun. Now, I’m a poet who lives in southern Minnesota, who teaches in academia. For me, there’re tensions to explore at those crossroads.

5. What does your creative process look like? How does the environment you are in shape your work or where do you like to write?

I like to move around. Mornings, I head to a desk in my apartment’s spare bedroom. I open a draft of a poem because I fear starting blank. I write, revise and stare at the poem for an hour or two. I take a break. Go for a walk. Wash dishes. Return to my desk for a while. I get up and read. I go for a run. I get ready to teach. On days I don’t teach, I hit a coffee shop or the University library. If it’s warm enough, I’ll walk to wherever I’m going to write. Evenings, my wife or I will make dinner. Evenings, I try to relax. I still struggle with the myth that a writer needs to write every day. I do like to “write” every day, though. Walking around with an awareness and openness, with questions, that’s writing. Watching a documentary is writing. Reading over a friend’s poem is writing. Listening to a podcast (Ologies!) is writing. Attending readings in the Twin Cities and thinking about the arrangement of your collection on the drive up is writing. I try not to get to bed too late.

6. What projects or pieces are you working on right now?

I’m very blessed in the support my writing has received this year. As far as poetry, I’ll be spending a good chunk of this summer working on a series of poems that may or may not make it into my first collection. Last summer I began writing what has become my “All-American Mexican” poems. That term—what it could mean, what it seems to imply—has been an obsession since it first came to me. I plan to explore the idea into exhaustion then gather poetry on the return trip.

Through the Loft Literary Center’s Mirrors & Windows Fellowship, I’m working on YA novel—my first long-form endeavor. Currently, that project is in its very beginning stages so all I can say is that it’s inspired by adolescence and the homegirls who I did graffiti with.

Congratulations to Michael on being a 2019 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant recipient! Visit his website here, and follow him on Twitter.