In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Catherine Pierce
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Catherine Pierce
You have two poems in Volume 26: “I Wonder if the Guy Who Catcalled Me in the Blockbuster Parking Lot When I Was 15 Ever Thinks About That,” and “Perfection™.” These two poems detail separate events, but there’s a kinship of perseverance in both of them. When crafting them, was there a connection between them for you, or were they created at different times?
That’s interesting—they were written at different times but they both went through a lot of revision before arriving at their final forms, so there’s perseverance in their creation as well as in their subject matter. Otherwise, though, any connection only came through later, as I was putting together a group of poems for submission and thought they might enjoy each other’s company.
“Perfection™” juxtaposes failure as a child playing games with the adult feeling of overwhelming responsibility for society’s failure. What inspired the braiding of these two times (adult and child)?
Poems for me are opportunities and spaces to sort through questions. I’d hated the game Perfection when I was a kid—so stressful! The time pressure, the buzz, the explosion of pieces… (I’d also hated Operation—a game that buzzes loudly at you if you make a mistake? Where the premise is that you lose if you botch a patient’s surgery? No, thank you!) But it wasn’t until a few years ago, after playing Perfection for the first time in decades, that I really thought about why the game had bugged me so much as a child, and, importantly, why it still did. It was stressful, sure, but so are other games that I enjoy. What was it about this one? Writing this poem from a place of questioning helped me to realize that “I was afraid to fail and so I failed”—and to see how that freezing up that can stem from fear of failure doesn’t necessarily stop in childhood.
“Fizz” and “buzz” are such accurate words to describe rage in “I Wonder if the Guy Who Catcalled Me…”. What prompted these descriptions? How did this poem take shape during creation and revision?
Ah, thank you—I’m glad you hooked into those words. To me, those verbs get at both the electric energy of rage and the thrill that can come with acknowledging and releasing it. I wanted to suggest the way that anger can feel almost seductive (I always think of champagne when I hear the word “fizz”).
This poem was one of those rare ones that happen quickly—or at least the language of it happened quickly. The form took quite a while. I’d initially drafted it as a conventionally lineated and punctuated poem—no blank space, no stanza breaks. But it just wasn’t working in that form—it didn’t have the sort of headlong, breathless feeling I wanted it to have. I ended up putting it aside for two years before revisiting it and deciding to play with the way it appears on the page. Once I began exploring the visual space of the poem, the whole thing opened up for me.
What’s your writing process like? For you, what makes a poem “done?”
My process is always in flux. I learned a long time ago that I’m not a person who is able to, or even who wants to, write every day. I go through productive times and fallow times, and I’ve become increasingly, though not entirely, comfortable with that ebb and flow.
When I’m working on a new poem, I do a lot of reading out loud, a lot of staring into the middle distance trying to find the accurate word or phrase. Once I’ve got a draft done—either one that I think is close to finished OR one that I feel has something worth pursuing but that I just can’t seem to crack—I’ll email it to my longtime friend Maggie Smith for her take. Maggie and I have been exchanging poems since our grad school days almost twenty-five years ago; by this point she knows my work as well as I do, so her responses are not only spot-on, craft-wise, but are also wonderfully intuitive in understanding what a given poem is going for—or could be going for.
I’ve also gotten better over the years at being honest with myself. If I’m not sure about a poem—if it just feels like it’s not quite there yet—I’ll wait on it, return to it over months or years until I feel like I’ve gotten it right. And when I read my poems out loud, I stay tuned in to my own attention—if I feel even slightly bored by any moment of the poem, I know that’s a spot to revisit.
What themes do you return to in your poetry?
Someone else might be a better judge of this than I am, but: animals and death and apocalypse and wonder and parenthood and longing and carnivals and mountains and weather and boardwalks and memory and trees and insects and Skee-Ball.
What are you working on now?
I’m currently working on poems that explore ideas of elements—the classical elements of earth, fire, wind, and water; the elements of ancient humoral theory; “the elements” as weather; the periodic table of elements; the elements of language. I’m also working on some essays, on some revisions, and on successfully growing blueberries.
Photo by Megan Bean
Catherine Pierce is the poet laureate of Mississippi and the author of four books of poems, most recently Danger Days (Saturnalia, 2020). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, The Nation, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. An NEA fellow and two-time Pushcart Prize winner, she co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Jax Connelly
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Jax Connelly
Your nonfiction piece “Not So Soft,” which appears in Volume 26, weaves running, sisterhood, eating disorders, and loss together. Your work is uniquely descriptive—“The ground is violent with leaves,” and “I was a pressure cooker of a teenager.” When and how did this piece first spring into existence? How long did it take you to write and develop the precise language you use?
I didn’t know this essay was about sisterhood or even, necessarily, eating disorders until several drafts and months in. I wouldn’t have come up with lines like “the ground is violent with leaves” or “I was a pressure cooker of a teenager” until I had submerged myself in the themes of the piece and started developing a more intentional recurring image system related to food, the body, types of harm, the things we try to bury, etc.
This piece takes place while the speaker is on a jog—cycling through concentration on the task at hand in these loops of thoughts and memories. It’s a very clever way to be able to naturally return to themes throughout the work. What inspired you to write with this conceit, and at what point in the process did this become realized?
This piece originated in a travel writing class I took in fall 2020 (an ironic time for a travel writing class; it took place on Zoom, of course). At a time when we couldn’t travel in the traditional sense, our professor (shoutout to Patty McNair) used an exercise called “the writer’s road trip” to encourage us to rethink what “travel” could mean—i.e., a walk around the block, a trip to the grocery store. The exercise provided a structure for narrative movement based within a relatively short, ordinary trip that the narrator takes alone: 15 steps that switched off between “on the road” steps and “pull over” steps. “On the road” steps were about moving the story and journey forward through the external landscape, while “pull over” steps were about deepening the narrative through memory, reflection, and new understandings. The “conceit” is that the exterior landscape evolves as the narrator moves through it, and time passes which allows the narrator to move around their interior landscape, too.
I feel like the weather plays a character in this story. What was your process of developing weather in relation to the human characters?
Nothing has the ability to piss me off more reliably than the weather. It’s this natural (though it sometimes feels supernatural) force that we have to arrange so much of our lives around, and we have absolutely no control over it. We’re just at its mercy, period. And I don’t know if I made this connection while I was writing the essay, but now that you’re pointing out how prominently the weather features, I’m realizing that’s kind of what it’s like to be inside an eating disorder. A lot of people think eating disorders are about body image, but in my experience they’re actually about control. You start using these behaviors and you’re thinking “this is how I will achieve total control over myself and my life.” And then one day you wake up and you realize you’ve been completely swallowed.
You utilize beautiful repetition throughout your work, not only here, but in other pieces like The Spectacular Years, published in Hunger Mountain Review. What is the role that you feel repetition plays in your writing?
In “Not So Soft,” I think the overlaps in the transitions between the paragraphs are a technique for mimicking the rhythm and cyclical nature of being on a run, especially a run along the same route you’ve run a million times before.
In “The Spectacular Years,” I think the repetition is functioning more in relationship to the way memory and, especially, writing about the past can simultaneously expand our understanding of what’s happened and obscure it. I’m fascinated by the fallibility of memory, and the way that fallibility interacts with the act of writing something down, especially writing something down that we believe to be “true.” Every time I go back and try to tell a story, whether a true story or not, I’m changing it slightly, not because I was lying then or I’m lying now, but because I’m seeing it from a different vantage point, and noticing something I either didn’t notice before or wasn’t ready to acknowledge. There’s a lot of hand wringing around what constitutes the ultimate, singular, capital-T “Truth” in creative nonfiction. But memory feels true, even when it’s false. We can interrogate that on the page, but we will never be able to figure out the ultimate, singular, capital-T “Truth” of our lives. I don’t believe truth exists in such a singular form. The truth is always plural, partial, multi-sided, fragmentary. Contradictory, even.
That, I think, is why repetition interests me in general—it’s this very cool craft way to insist upon constant reimaginings and multiple truths.
For me as a fiction writer, approaching nonfiction feels very vulnerable, yet you’ve cultivated a frank, open style. What draws you to nonfiction? How do you decide what pieces of yourself you share with the audience, and which you don’t?
I think it’s all coming from the same place, really. I don’t think my process is all that different from a fiction writer’s. The more I write, the less married I am to the label of “nonfiction,” and at the same time I feel almost protective of it as a genre, because a lot of people, when they hear “creative nonfiction,” get confused—if it’s “nonfiction,” how can it be “creative”? Don’t those words cancel each other out? But nonfiction isn’t just glorified diary keeping: “This happened and then this happened and then this happened.” Whether we’re writing fiction or nonfiction or something in between, we’re all always shaping the story, and we’re always making decisions about how much of ourselves to share in that story. That requires leaving a whole lot of stuff out. It requires picking and choosing and pulling things apart and rearranging them very carefully, playing some things up, others down. Whatever happened, there are a million ways to write it. I know I’ll never get it exactly, precisely right, but I think there is something uniquely powerful about applying literary and poetic techniques to the “facts” of your own life, using them to scrutinize and question the various “truths” you’ve had to swallow, and also uncover the ones which have maybe always been lurking underneath the surface.
(As a sidebar that’s more related to my own thoughts above than your original question, I will add that I believe this question of “truths” is also inextricably intertwined with queerness and transness, because part of what writing does, for me, is retroactive work to both stabilize and destabilize the liminalities inherent in queer and trans bodies and intimacies. Writing is an embodied act in itself, right? So we’re living in these bodies and we’re also writing in these bodies, about things that have happened while we’ve been living in these bodies. I think if we understand “true stories” as perhaps a broader, more complicated space than “This happened and then this happened and then this happened,” we might feel freer to abandon the idea of the fixed and static frame typically associated with capital-T “Truth,” and let ourselves fall deeper into the shiftingness that is necessary, not threatening, to the “integrity” of a queer and trans “I.” Especially a queer and trans “I” that creates.)
What themes do you keep returning to in your writing?
Unstable bodies, mental illness, queer and trans experiences, family trauma, the fallibility of memory, unreliable narration, “truth” in all its forms, liminal relationships, relational ruptures, constructions of language, and, importantly, my dog.
Do you have favorite books that have influenced your writing? What authors do you return to?
My Body is a Book of Rules, Elissa Washuta’s first essay collection, was hugely influential on me back before I even started writing, as was Wendy C. Ortiz’s memoir Excavation. I’ve read Problems by Jade Sharma more times than probably any other book. The work of T. Fleischmann for a masterclass on the book-length essay. The anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, especially the work of Ari Banias, Oliver Bendorf, and Dawn Lundy Martin, for new ways of thinking about trans bodies in relation to bodies of text. We the Animals by Justin Torres is probably the book I recommend most often. Kiese Laymon’s memoir Heavy should be required reading for all. Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood, Melissa Febos, Jenny Boully, Maggie Nelson, Alexander Chee, Michelle Tea, and Eileen Myles are a few of the authors I return to again and again. A few books I loved recently: Post-Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson, The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison, and Manywhere by Morgan Thomas.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on a book-length braided essay that investigates forgiveness and cycles of abuse, and I’m trying to balance that by taking regular breaks to work on very short flash essays that have nothing to do with those topics. And I’ve got new stuff coming out soon in Off Assignment, Slag Glass City, and The Georgia Review.
Jax Connelly (they/she) is an award-winning writer whose creative nonfiction explores the intersections of queer identity, unstable bodies, and mental illness. Their essays have received honors including three Notables in the Best American Essays series, Nowhere Magazine’s Fall 2020 Travel Writing Prize, first place in the 2019 Prairie Schooner Creative Nonfiction Essay Contest, and the 2018 Pinch Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction, among others.You can read more of her work in Fourth Genre, [PANK], The Rumpus, Hunger Mountain, Ruminate, Pleiades, and online at jaxconnelly.wixsite.com/writer
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Elise Paschen
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Elise Paschen
Your poem, “Divination,” is a gorgeous blend of imagery, myth, and spring welcoming. Where did the spark for this poem come from?
Thank you! During the pandemic, our family moved to a house in rural southwest Michigan. Spending days in isolation, I became fascinated by the birds outdoors. In another poem in this series, “Skywriting,” I describe living in our house as if in an aviary. When I drafted “Divination,” I had been inspired by the image of robins festooning a tree in the cold of winter. I then continued the trajectory of my beguilement by imagining the emptied nests around our house inhabited in spring.
I love the cascading effect of the lines. With layered poetry like this, I’m always curious if there’s another way this poem can, or is intended, to be read? How did you craft this format?
While working on “Divination,” I also was writing a long poem, “Heritage,” which employed a similar staggered stanza structure. In the past I’ve written contrapuntal poems which can be read vertically or horizontally. This one functions more as a concrete poem, mimicking spatially the robins on the branches. Behind the poem’s structure lies this notion of threes, inspired by a sense of divinity in nature.
So much of your work delves into the themes of relationships and nature. What draws you to these themes?
Throughout my life I’ve had an ineffable relationship with the natural world, a place which offers inspiration and sustenance. During our time of isolation, I rooted more deeply into realms outside the human one.
Your poems have the qualities of stories. What is your writing process? When you set out to write a poem, do you have a narrative, or do you work from imagery?
I try to catch the impulse of the poem when it arrives, allowing the music to carry its own momentum. I often will write the first draft quickly and then continue redrafting the original version. Poems have been inspired by many things—history, dreams, art, film, myth, memory, emotion, the natural world, to name a few. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on William Butler Yeats’s revisions of his female persona poems, and I am a relentless reviser. When working on a poem, I hope that the language will help to determine its particular direction. I also endeavor to surprise myself while writing—so, much of the time, I don’t know where the poem will travel.
Over these past years I’ve envisioned writing a book-length project. My previous books have been assembled through accretion, poem by poem. With my new book, “Blood Wolf Moon,” I’ve attempted to create a narrative which engages the reader from beginning to end. Within the dramatic propulsion of the narrative there is an intrinsic architecture, a sense of plot or even a five-act structure.
A new writing preoccupation is to create sequences of poems, in which one poem will lead to the composition of the next. As I had mentioned, “Blood Wolf Moon” opens with a long poem called “Heritage,” composed of hanging indent stanzas. The last line of the first poem becomes the first line of the next, creating a crown of fourteen poems. There are several other series in the book, including the avian poems and a botanic suite, which I’ve broken up and scattered throughout. In part four of the book, I’ve taken earlier prose fragments and created a prose poem memoir sequence.
Poetry is, in a way, a language unto itself. And you’ve written work that incorporates the Osage Nation’s language, including “́/Waléze/Stationery” and “͘ ́ ́/Máze Htáhtaze/Typewriter.” Can you talk about what your process is like when working with multiple languages in your writing?
I have always been fascinated by the Osage language. On my desk are two Osage dictionaries, the older one compiled by Francis La Flesche and the newer one by Carolyn Quintero. The La Flesche dictionary helped my work on a poem called “Wi-gi-e,” which is spoken by Mollie Burkhart whose family was systematically murdered during the Reign of Terror (1921-1926) in Oklahoma. A line from that poem, “During Xtha-cka Zhi-ga Tse-the, the Killer of the Flowers Moon,” helped to inspire the title for David Grann’s book and Martin Scorsese’s film, “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
While working on “Blood Wolf Moon,” I began delving into Quintero’s dictionary. In “́/Waléze/Stationery” and “͘ ́ ́/Máze Htáhtaze/Typewriter,” I chose words in the dictionary at the end of the alphabet and worked my way forward. With regard to this process, I see the words in translation and the poem arises, tapping my past, my dream life, my unconscious, offering unexpected discoveries. Esther Belin accepted these poems for her special issue on Land Acknowledgment for “Poetry” Magazine. Right after the acceptance, I became aware of the creation of Osage orthography by the Osage Nation. Christopher Cote from the Osage Nation Language Department provided the translations in orthography for the poems.
Where do you draw inspiration from in your life? What authors or works inspire you?
I love balancing my work as a writer with my work as an anthologist. Reading and discovering poems by others continues to fuel my own writing. My most recent anthology, “The Eloquent Poem,” is based on writing workshops I’ve taught in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As I teach that anthology this semester, I continue to rediscover new aspects of the poems we study. How I love, for instance, Kimiko Hahn’s collage poem, “Things I Am Beginning to Forget.” Next week we’ll discuss January Gill O’Neil’s “Bloom,” along with other mirror poems. The book includes artist statements at the back, so you can learn from the poets (as well as from my general introductions) how to write an ekphrastic poem or an aubade or an ars poetica, for instance.
I’m a founding board member of Indigenous Nations Poets, and we’re talking to my editor, Gabriel Fried, about editing another Persea anthology comprised of poems by our In-Na-Po Fellows and Board members. The work of these writers continues to amaze me, and I can’t wait to get started on this project.
I look for inspiration in all the poems I encounter. I was struck by how Rowan Ricardo Phillips’ first and final poem in “Silver” mirror each other in reverse. I’ve written a couple of mirror poems but had never thought to begin and end a collection with one. Reading Monica Youn’s “Detail of the Rice Chest,” helped jumpstart a recent new poem. Joy Harjo’s “An American Sunrise” inspired the trajectory of “Blood Wolf Moon.” Another favorite is Timothy Donnelly’s “Chariot”—a multi-faceted jewel of a poetry collection. I look forward to reading Sophie Cabot Black’s collection, “Geometry of the Restless Herd,” and Kenzie Allen’s “Cloud Missives,” among many other books coming out soon.
You have authored several poetry collections, The Nightlife, Bestiaries, and Infidelities, among numerous other works. What project is at your fingertips now?
I just brought out a chapbook, titled “Tallchief,” (Magic City Books Press, 2023), a selection of poems from my first three books as well as new poems, inspired by my mother, the prima ballerina Maria Tallchief. She is featured on the US quarter, and her Osage name is represented in Osage orthography. When I was working with the US Mint on helping to choose the design for the coin, the Osage Nation Language Department suggested the Mint incorporate the orthography —hence my own realization of the need to include orthography in the Osage translation poems.
“Blood Wolf Moon” will be published by Red Hen Press in April 2025. The poet Rachel DeWoskin, after reading the manuscript, wrote a beautiful long email. Here’s an excerpt: “There are constellations all the way throughout, stars and birds and light and darkness and beauty and horror and nature and humans and history – multiple languages, bloodlines, meter.” I’m grateful to Rachel for these words.
Photo by Beowulf Sheehan
Elise Paschen is the author of six poetry collections, including The Nightlife and Blood Wolf Moon, forthcoming in spring 2025. Her poems have been published widely, including The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, and The Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry. She has edited or co-edited numerous anthologies, including The Eloquent Poem and The New York Times bestseller, Poetry Speaks. Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—luna rey hall
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—luna rey hall
Your poem, “wearing a dress for the first time,” is rich with tension. The first phrase, “do you want me to be honest?” carries so much emotional weight. What prompted you to start with this question?
i think that honesty is an inherent part of the trans and/or gender nonconforming experience—not only asking honesty of people in my life but of myself as well. that line acts as an opening into me being honest with my experience. the uncomfortable nature of the experience and not being afraid to talk about that with people that love me. obviously, it also works for the narrative and introduces the mother figure as this voice of uncertainty and confusion, that eventually becomes the throughline for the entire poem. the most interesting aspect of the trans experience to me has been how it affects and shapes the people around you and ultimately, this poem is one moment in that story.
As I read this piece, I equated the spacing you use in this piece to difficult pauses. While it’s a friction-filled scene, the language flows beautifully across the page. What was your creation process like for this poem? Did the spacing come later or when you were writing? What was the revision process like for this piece?
space and spacing are always in the front of my mind when i write pieces. i learned early on in my writing career to allow the white space to be as important as the words and because of that a lot of my writing is shaped by those pauses, the little moments of brevity in often hard truths or dense imagery.
i look back on the creation process, and really the revision process too, for this poem in particular as something i could replicate in more poems as it didn’t change much from the original free write to the finished version that appeared in print. the content and structure remained the same, the key differences were line breaks, small details, etc.
I heard you read this piece at the Water~Stone reading in November, where you said this poem was based on an actual day. How did you decide to put this moment into poetry instead of nonfiction prose?
at this point, my brain simply functions best in poetic lines. prose, in all its infinite forms, is scary—i say as i’m working on a novel.
What themes do you find that you keep returning to in your writing? What are new themes you want to explore?
right now, it’s extinction(s) that i keep returning to and continue to explore in possible future books. i’m very much an obsessive person by nature, for better or for worse, and i do tend to get stuck on a subject for years. for a lot of my writing it’s finding the intersections of my obsessions, whether that be gun violence in America, masculinity, queerness, mental health, the body, transness, grief, family, isolation, AI, or any number of true horrors that permeate the human experience.
What are you writing now?
i’m always juggling several different projects at the same time—right now, i’m finishing up my next novella (the bizarre disappearance of bella riley) that comes out next year, working with a publisher on a chapbook about
transness and loss, starting the early stages of revision for a novel, and then putting together the next full-length collection.
luna rey hall is a queer trans nonbinary writer. they are the author of four books, including the patient routine (Brigids Gate Press, 2023). their poems have appeared in The Florida Review, The Rumpus, and Raleigh Review, among others. they live in St. Paul, Minnesota.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Michael Levy
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Michael Levy
Your nonfiction piece, “Abscission,” details your grandmother’s life and your relationship with her as she aged. It asks the question what memories we will recall later in life. What prompted you to write this piece?
I’ve always been a bit preoccupied with memory and the passage of time—the nature of how fleeting a life and the moments that make it up really are. I’m also a pretty sentimental person; I think in my piece I say something to the effect of being “prone to wistfulness.”
When the scenes that bookend the piece happened—of my grandmother meeting my nephew Nathan, who was her first great grandchild; and sitting outside with my grandfather in Straus Park—they just felt so rich, and such a great way into a possible story that would deal with those themes. I remember frantically pecking away in the Notes app on my iPhone to get details and ideas down.
I didn’t know where it would go from there, but I did know that I wanted to write something and wrestle with those ideas.
“Abscission” is told in pieces; we get glimpses of your grandmother during various parts of her life as it intersects with yours and your family. Memory can be a fickle thing, not only in old age, but even as we look back on fond or difficult memories of our own. How did you approach this idea of memory as fluid in “Abscission?”
That’s a great question. Part of what makes memory so interesting is that, though it is in theory a collection of fixed moments (or events or people or emotions, or what have you) from the past, they change over time; that is, as we have new experiences, gain new wisdom, it all shapes how we relate to our memories. How we perceived a memory ten years ago might be totally at odds with how we think of it today. So, in that sense, memory is always in flux.
Add to that the fallibility of memory and the things that happen to us in old age and, well, it’s an endlessly interesting and complex topic.
Part of how I approached that fluidity was with structure—I didn’t want things to be purely chronological—but also to just try to juxtapose memories of young Michael with adult Michael. And then of course, simply juxtaposing an old woman whose memory is disappearing with a baby whose memories are just forming—it felt like that spoke volumes on its own about the nature of memory.
What sort of family research did you do to write this piece, or did you draw from events and history you already knew?
A lot of the “research” was just being a grandson and son—spending time with my grandfather, chatting with my mother on walks. Very little of what is in the story did I seek out with a mindset of, I need to get this information so I can write this piece.
Much of it I already knew. Then there were other bits that I thought I knew, but as I sat down to write, realized that I didn’t. So for example: My great grandparents and their children emigrated from Hungary to the U.S. in the 1930s. They were Jewish, as am I. I kind of always assumed their emigration was related to pogroms, rising anti-semitism, Hitler. But when I was discussing it with my mother, I learned they actually left because my great-grandfather Benjamin had accrued a serious amount of debt in Hungary, so essentially fled to America! My great-grandmother Rose, my great aunts and uncles, and my grandmother (then a toddler), joined him soon after. Learning that felt like a strange little variation on the classic Jewish refugee tale of woe—a bit endearing even?
How long did it take you to craft “Abscission?” Did you find yourself leaving out pieces that you originally put in? If so, is this a theme one you’ll return to?
Years? That’s not entirely true, but neither is it entirely not true. In one of the previous questions you refer to the “glimpses” we get of my grandmother. I had always wanted to write something about my grandparents. Originally, I thought I would probably focus more on my grandfather, to be perfectly honest. I wrote a number of longer scenes and descriptions about my grandfather—about his obsessive book collecting, in particular—that just didn’t find a home in “Abscission.” Perhaps one day I’ll still write a companion piece, focusing more on him, as I’m quite fond of some of the stuff that I cut out.
As an editor of several magazines (Summit Journal, American Alpine Journal, and Appalachia), how does your professional experience influence your personal writing?
Most of my other professional experience is in the quite niche world of rock-climbing and mountaineering journalism. It’s my greatest passion—practicing it and writing about it—but it can also feel limiting. Writing a personal essay like Abscission is an escape from that stuff, a chance to flex my creative writing muscles in a different way. That being said, writing about climbing and mountaineering is ultimately just a vehicle to tell affecting human stories—and so reading and writing non-climbing literature feels critical in terms of learning and finding new ways to approach those stories.
What books and authors are your favorites, or are ones that you keep returning to?
Tough question! I’ll give you one fiction and one non-fiction writer.
I’m a huge fan of Wallace Stegner, whom I don’t think always gets his due. I think his final book, Crossing to Safety, is a real masterpiece.
I’m also a big admirer of Chris Offutt, particularly his memoiristic works. His first memoir, The Same River Twice, I came across by chance in a used bookstore years ago, and was floored by how good it was. I’ve gifted it to a number of people over the years and gone on to read everything he has written.
What new projects are you working on now?
Editing and publishing Summit Journal is so time-consuming that I find it difficult to write much beyond my editor’s notes these days. But perhaps I’ll start tinkering with that possible essay about my grandfather soon…
Michael Levy is the editor of Summit, the oldest monthly rock-climbing magazine in America. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Outside, Men’s Journal, and Sierra, among other publications. He lives in New York City. Read his website for more information.