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.
In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Danielle Decatur
In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Danielle Decatur
Your wonderful fiction piece, “Lies on the Lips,” shows your main character Nell’s quiet transformation into confidence (and a little past that) with the help of a pair of marker-drawn lips. Where did this idea come from?
The idea of Nell came to me first. I wanted to write about someone who doesn’t always express herself, but has lots of thoughts and opinions! Then, I started to think about what would have to happen for Nell to find her voice?
I love how the relationships within this piece are fleshed out so well, and you do that with little backstory and instead focus on the character’s interactions. What’s your process when writing these complex relationships?
First, I try to really understand how the protagonist is influenced by the others in the story. Since it’s a short story, I have to make choices on who the reader gets to really know. For example, Nell’s dad has a role in this story but he’s passed. It isn’t important for the reader to know Nell’s dad, but they do need to know how his absence has influenced those still there. Someone told me every character thinks they are a main character and you have to write them as such. So I wanted to write Nell’s dad that way as if to say, he may not be there but he has left his mark.
Both this piece and Come What May (published in Midnight Breakfast) flirt with the edges of magic realism, and yet still remain planted in reality. Is that something that you consciously develop as you write?
This choice isn’t exactly intentional. My writing centers Black characters and even if they are in a situation that reflects reality I try to push beyond the expected. I never want my characters to be bound to a specific narrative and sometimes that means sprinkling a little magic in there.
You utilize the setting of Shaker Heights throughout your work. What draws you to write with that setting? How does place influence plot for you?
I grew up in Shaker Heights! Shaker Heights, as I knew it, was developed in the 60s as a planned community to support racial integration. This purposeful integration and planning is rife for interesting storytelling. For example, two-family homes in Shaker only have one front door to remove the stigma of someone living in a multi-family. Shaker is also very relatable as a midwestern Ohio town, but very unique in its history.
What literary works and authors inspire you or your writing?
I adore Toni Morrison. She created worlds of Black characters without the white gaze. I hope my work does something similar. I also love reading Britt Bennett, Jesmyn Ward, and Celeste Ng.
What are you writing now?
I am currently querying for my novel, searching for the right person to help me bring it to market. I’m also writing another short story that is a little different. It has a little bit of suspense, but that slight hand of magical realism too.
Danielle Decatur is a creative director and fiction writer. She graduated from the University of Virginia with a BA in English and literature and received an MFA from Bennington College. Her short stories have appeared in Northwest Review, Midnight Breakfast, and Silver Needle Press. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and two sons.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Teresa Carmody
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Teresa Carmody
Your beautifully braided nonfiction piece, “Reading the Deck with Zora Neale Hurston,” speaks about the trauma of growing up in a house where you were not accepted. You deftly layer personal details and history lessons, weaving “Their Eyes Were Watching God” throughout. What was the spark that made you blend these together? How did this piece begin?
First, thank you for these questions and the opportunity to speak about this essay; I’m delighted that it’s included in Water-Stone Review, in the company of such fine writers and artists.
“Reading the Deck” began with reflecting on who and where I was when I first read Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, which was the summer after high school graduation. I was a vibrating shell of unrecognized desire: I didn’t know myself as queer, or that I wanted to be a writer, or that feminism was even a thing. Instead, I had a lot of terrifying and guilt-inducing religious narratives, having been raised both Catholic and Evangelical, with all the spiritual trauma and household warring that implies. Yet I also sensed the world, including earth, as more than “dead” materials or resources, to be conquered and extracted, which is a narrative that serves capitalism and settler colonialism. I had, in other words, an intuition that took years to understand. To find the language for.
Some of the questions I was thinking about more broadly: How do you open yourself to change? Who do you welcome in as teachers and guides? This essay is part of a larger collection that centers some of the writers and artists who showed me other narratives, other ways to be.
I love the conversational nature with readers that you carry throughout the text. How did that voice develop?
I experience voice as frequency I tune into. With any piece of writing, my goal is to calibrate toward what is necessary and true, even as I consider writing as a kind of performance in language, with voice. I think of Djuna Barnes (another writer I focus on in this collection) who used to conduct interviews as “Pen Performer.” To me, this is a very exciting—and honest—nom de plume.
Sometimes, a first sentence will come into my consciousness, as if someone else, or a different part of me, is speaking. This happened with “Reading the Deck,” but that did not mean the essay came easily. I initially drafted it by writing topics or words on a set of notecards, which I drew randomly, like tarot cards, as prompts for freewriting. The first draft was rough and problematic, in part because I wasn’t interrogating my distorted white gaze. A friend (and the wonderful poet), Vidhu Aggarwal, pointed this out, along with some structural issues. Two years and more revisions later, I brought a draft to my writing group, and their feedback and insights helped me to finally land the piece. What I’m suggesting is that the conversational tone may come, in part, from the conversations I was having, literally about and through the writing, for several years. As I like to tell my students: even if we are sitting by ourselves, we do not write alone.
Also, the essay is also about gossip, so maybe it should feel a bit talky!
Looking at your process for a piece of this magnitude, how does the creation, as
well as the editing for all the layers, work for you?
This piece includes a lot of research—everything from one of my PhD topics (hello, gossip), to spending a week in Hurston’s archive at the University of Florida. I have taught Their Eyes Were Watching God repeatedly over the past many years, re-reading it every time I do (I also recommend the audio book, narrated by Ruby Dee). In some ways, I see writing itself as a process of layering, fueled by questions you are bringing to the work, and questions posed by the writing. What does the writing require of you? I am obsessed with the relationship between art and life, and much of my work is autotheoretical, so I also keep returning to ways in which the personal and the historical are always entwined. How every life is situated within a particular time and place, and just as political, social, and historical forces shape the physical landscapes we move through, so, too, with our internal landscapes, or imaginations. It is scary and wondrous to realize that our preferences and desires are malleable, even as each person is a unique expression of everything that makes them, from their grandmother’s oocytes to the food they eat and the media they consume.
I’ve wandered away from your question, I realize, even as this is often how my writing emerges. Slant.
While some of your deck interjections are based on writings of Butler and Hurston, what was your process in crafting the others?
I read tarot cards as part of a divinatory practice, but you don’t need a tarot deck to read cards. Many people have and do use regular playing cards, which are the cards referenced in Hurston’s song, or rhyme, that runs on the left-side of my essay. The right-side readings, or interjections, are some of my understandings of the cards—yes, in conversation with others, including Butler—but also in conversation with other tarot readers, like the writers Selah Saterstrom, Lou Florez, and Kristen Nelson. To me, cards don’t ‘predict the future’ as much as they signal questions and situations the querent is invited to consider. Today, for example, when I sat with your questions, I pulled the Queen of Swords, which corresponds to the Queen of Spades. I’ve learned the queens as mothers of the deck, the readers, the gate and the one who opens the gate. Swords for intellect, for the quality of air, for articulation. For attuning to intuitive logics set on your higher purpose, or reason of being. I think about adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy: your evolution requires speaking yourself into existence, but also speaking your fears or bad programming into view. Which brings me to your next question…
I love how you talk about internalized misogyny and your story of being on a plane with a woman pilot; I had a very similar experience, and had to take a long look at my preconceived notions. How do you break down your misconceptions?
I think misconceptions, including fears, get stored in the body, which means the body is a great source for understanding the many social and cultural beliefs we’ve internalized, including the toxic ones. I mean, if you convince a woman she doesn’t matter and isn’t worth listening to, then she shuts herself up! And isn’t that convenient for white patriarchy?!
I can know something intellectually, but still hold the lie of misogyny within my body. And it’s a blessing, really, when moments like my experience on the airplane bring such beliefs into awareness, because that’s when you can release or transmute them. One bit at a time.
The philosopher George Yancy, who I reference in the essay, theorizes similarly around whiteness, which he describes as ‘insidious,’ rooting etymologically through the Latin insidiae, meaning “plot, snare, ambush.” As an antiracist white person, I’m perpetually caught within, and constituted by, the structural and material power of racial hierarchies. I’m paraphrasing Yancy here to note that those moments when my whiteness becomes visible, when I’m ambushed by my whiteness, are also profound moments for shifting misconceptions and harmful beliefs.
Two more guides in addition to names already mentioned: bell hooks and Marshall Rosenberg’s teachings around non-violent communication.
“Books are energies we draw to us when we are ready” is a line I absolutely love in here. What other authors, or their writing, bring you that inspiration?
So many! This particular essay is part of a longer collection that also focuses on Clarice Lispector, Kathy Acker, Audre Lorde, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Tee Corinne, their work and their archives, official and unofficial. These are just some of the artists and writers who have nurtured my artistic, political, and emotional growth over the years. In queer community, we talk about chosen family, often because our bio families refuse us. To me, that chosen family includes friends and the people I read, living and dead. My chosen mothers, and I count Zora Neale Hurston as one of those.
You have authored Maison Femme: a fiction and Reconception of Marie, among several other books, and your work appeared in numerous literary magazines. Where did your writing journey start?
I kept misreading this question as when, not where, and then resisting it, because I experience writing as beginning again and again, in a time of its own logic, outside of the Gregorian calendar (which I write about in The Reconception of Marie). I’m talking about writing generally, the way we are scripted and then, with grace and in dialogue with others, re-vision that script, repeatedly. And I’m also thinking about the experience of writing something specific, how a particular story or essay or novel unfolds in its own time, sometimes quickly, but sometimes over the course of many years.
To get to where: I was living in the Pacific Northwest, in Olympia, WA, when I gave myself, internally, to writing, deciding to study this art and to cultivate a writing practice, as more important than any day job. For me, the where of writing continues to be deeply internal, a site for the liberatory and radical work of reclaiming the imagination.
What writing are you doing now? What’s your next big project?
I’m finishing revisions on my next book: A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others, forthcoming from Autofocus Books in 2024. It’s a novel-in-stories, or collection of autofictions, about Marie, the same-ish character in Maison Femme: a fiction and The Reconception of Marie. These three Maries share many qualities, friends, and background stories, but the form, tone or atmosphere, and even some of her specifics, shift from book to book, like how bodies change. To me, this is a question about auto-bio writing, what it means to “write a life.”
I often think about the book as a body, with its spine and feet-notes and head-er. And then the experience of knowing one’s consciousness, in some kind of steady or familiar way, even as the body changes, ages, sprouts pubic hair and later, bags beneath the eyes. But there is still the five-year-old inside you, and you knew yourself then, and you know yourself now. Differently but the same.
I’m trying to write that.
Teresa Carmody (she/they) is a writer of fiction, creative nonfiction, inter-arts collaborations, and hybrid forms. She is the author of three books: The Reconception of Marie (2020), Maison Femme: A Fiction (2015), and Requiem (2005). A collection of autofictions, A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others, is forthcoming. Carmody is a co-founding director of Les Figues Press in Los Angeles. She teaches in the Writer’s Workshop and low-residency FMA program at the University of Nebraska Omaha.