In the Field: Conversations with our Contributors—A. Muia
In the Field: Conversations with our Contributors—A. Muia
This week, we talk with A. Muia about her piece, “Dolores-Born-Without-Ears,” place-based writing, and the inspiration behind her novel.
Your piece, “Dolores-Born-Without-Ears,” is set in 1883 and tells the story of Dolores, who is married to Don Transito and taken to live with him near a gold mine to manage a store for the miners. The story takes place across the days of her husband’s slow death. What was the inspiration behind this story? How did it come to be?
This story is part of a larger work, a novel-in-stories set in Baja California in the 19th century. Many of the chapters can stand alone, but they are stronger within the context of the whole novel—the story of crumbling Spanish colonial missions in remote places in the Baja desert, and the people that intersect with those places. Dolores is one of the central characters moving through the narrative, and she appears in several of the chapters. We’ve met her in childhood, as a girl who idolizes the adoptive father who cannot show love to her. Now we see her again in adulthood. Unlike many of the chapters, this story doesn’t take place at one of the ruined missions, but at another historical site on the Baja peninsula—the gold mining town of Calmallí. It’s a desolate, dusty, mine-pocked landscape in Central Baja, with a small settlement of desperate gold miners. It’s a place of rough men, a place of wrecked dreams . . . and I wondered what would happen if Dolores were brought to that particular place. Where the land seems to work against the designs of men, and where Dolores is also working against the men in her own subversive way.
You are developing a series of stories set in a similar setting and timeframe—Baja California during the 19th century. All these pieces are developing into a novel. From your website, it sounds like this piece in Water~Stone follows one of the main characters of your in-progress novel. Was it your original intention to create a novel? Are you someone who knows how a story will end—how all the pieces will come together—or do you write to find the story?
Yes, this is part of a novel in stories, a structure which I almost discovered by accident. I’d been planning to write a conventional novel for years, and I finally set aside three months to begin. The first chapter went down well—the story of a priest who causes the death of a boy by compelling him to fish for pearls. And in the chapters that followed, the writing got bad, very bad, as I tried to drive the plot along. I felt really depressed; the thing I’d dreamt of doing for so long was pretty awful, and I knew it. Then a writer friend said I should try writing short stories for a while, an idea I resisted at first. I hadn’t read many short stories, and truthfully, I thought of short stories as a lesser form, something people wrote to train for writing a novel. But after wrestling with the failing novel for another two months, I was ready to try something I thought might clear my head. I took the first chapter and turned it into a stand-alone short story, and I fell in love with the form. I started buying old college literature survey textbooks, devouring the short stories. Studying them. I marveled at how much could be accomplished in such a small space. That first chapter was picked up quickly by Image Journal and published, and I became a devoted short-form writer. I started thinking about my novel differently: What if place, time, and theme became the unifying arc of the novel instead of a single plot? What if I set each chapter in an important place in Baja—especially at the ruined mission buildings? And what if I took the three most interesting characters and created throughlines for them throughout the novel, and then brought their stories together at the end? I started studying other novels in linked stories, like Claire of the Sealight and In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. I love the flexibility and variety I’ve found in this structure. I doubt I’ll ever go back to the conventional novel.
What drew you to this place and time? Are you interested in other place-based writing? Are you working on any other projects?
I love literature of place, the kind of story that transports us fully into a physical context. I love exploring how “place” is not just a backdrop for a story, but a living, breathing locale that has agency—because place affects and influences character. I was born near Mission Santa Barbara in California, and as I got older and learned more about mission history, the more tension I felt between admiration for the beautiful structures and sorrow about the tragic legacy of colonialism and occupation and what that meant for native peoples. My original novel was set in California, but I soon became intrigued by Baja California history—which most Americans know little about. And that led to a lot of research trips, and travels on mules, and interviews with Baja California ranchers and their families. Though the Spanish missions in California are rebuilt and tidied up for tourists, many of the missions in Baja are now ruins, some in very remote places. That was a further draw for me—I love abandoned places, and the stories that once inhabited them. My next novel—a novel-in-stories, of course—will be set in the now-abandoned Northern State Hospital, a state asylum here in my own Skagit County.
This story weaves between Dolores’ and the unnamed falluquero’s point of view with vivid descriptions and intense action in between. Can you talk about why you chose to end the piece from the falluquero’s point of view?
This story actually occurs over two chapters. In the second part, we see the falluquero returning to Calmallí in hopes of finding Dolores again. When he finds that she’s left, he pursues her with the aim of “helping” her, while in denial about his own motives. In that story, the final perspective belongs to Dolores. That was important for me, because she is one of the most marginalized people in the book.
What writers inspire or influence your work? Who are some authors you enjoy?
I especially appreciate understated writing—authors like Kent Haruf, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Alan Paton. It’s probably a flaw in my own writing, being so worried about sentimentality that I can become too reserved. I lean toward outward gestures, toward surface detail, and show less of the internal workings of my characters. We observe them from a greater distance. But I hope that even without a lot of internality, the characters ring true to how people we know behave and respond. And from those recognitions, we can infer why they do the things they do—because they are familiar to our understanding of human beings.
Your work as a writing teacher for Underground Writing serves a wide community in Northern Washington, including the young people at Skagit County Juvenile Detention. What drew you to this work?
For many years I served as a jail chaplain in the county jail, and as the co-director of a nonprofit organization of homes for people struggling with drug and alcohol addiction. It seemed a natural fit to join the two worlds I love—advocacy and writing—by becoming part of Underground Writing, which facilitates writing workshops for underrepresented or hidden people in our county. I hadn’t worked with youth before, so in many ways we were discovering these writing explorations together. We mostly read poetry—because the session time is short—and we seek to be in dialogue with the poem, to write something in a similar vein, to ask or answer a question that arises after reading. This is a moment when the students don’t have to be concerned with spelling or grammar or handwriting. This isn’t school. It’s elevating their voices, giving them a space for expression. We’ve produced some anthologies of student work, and regularly feature their writing on our social media and podcasts. This thrills them, of course. Who doesn’t love being published? When I’m working with the youth, I often think of one of my favorite craft books, Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write, and her philosophy that everyone has something interesting and important to say. That is certainly true here. I’ve been amazed at the wisdom and the honesty of these students. Recently one of them asked me: “Do you see us as criminals?” He needed to know that what we do in the workshop is real. It’s real writing, it’s truth. It’s not a program aimed at reformation. And I found myself saying that I don’t see them as others might. I don’t look them up on the internet. I don’t know what they’ve done or why they’re in detention. We’re just fellow writers, coming together around the table. Writing and listening to each other. Hearing our voices. Coming out of hiding. It’s been a joy.
A. Muia‘s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Baltimore Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Chicago Review, Faultline, Image, The Orison Anthology, Raleigh Review, The Stockholm Review of Literature, West Branch, The Writer’s Chronicle, and other journals. She holds a post-graduate certificate in writing literary fiction from the University of Washington and an MFA in creative writing from Seattle Pacific University, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Find her online at www.amuia.net.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Joseph Holt
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Joseph Holt
This week, we spoke with Jospeh Holt on finding inspiration in small moments, place and setting in writing, and his upcoming works.
Photo by Bryan Papazov from Unsplash
Your flash nonfiction piece, “People in Cars Outside the Coin Laundry,” talks about the daily interactions (or lack of interactions) at a laundromat. What was the inspiration behind this story? How did it come to be?
I recall doing laundry at a particular laundromat in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. That’s where I first made the notes that became this little essay. My life then was very busy, and doing laundry forced me to slow down. I wasn’t trying to multitask or anything. I was probably a little bored—in a good way—which led me to daydream about narrating the experience. That said, it took several years for my notes to take shape. In the meantime, my memories of that one laundromat became more like a generalized nostalgia for an unhurried day.
I love the phrase you craft at the beginning, “itinerant people,” echoed later with the phrase “what counts as home.” Where is your favorite place that you’ve traveled or worked? Do you find that various locations help you develop different stories?
Yes and no that the places I’ve been help me with writing. It’s weird, because I’ve lived in some exotic places—Taiwan, Wales, and Norway, for instance—but I never write about them. I always felt that I was just passing through, and that I could only ever glimpse the surfaces. In that way, I’ve felt “itinerant.” But then there’s places like my grandparents’ farms, the basements of my high school friends, or a laundromat in Hattiesburg. These places are smaller and more local, and they seem like “home” by virtue of my comfort there. They can operate for me like blueprints: I imagine the lives that pass through them and their dramatic possibility.
I was impressed that for such a short piece, it’s packed with the stillness of hours. Do you find you normally draw inspiration from daily moments like these? Or from where do you draw inspiration?
I do try noticing things. Back like ten or twelve years ago, I took a mindfulness course where the instructor passed around some prunes and asked us to meditate on their journey: from seed to fruit to commercial product, plus all the humans and machines that altered their course. It’s actually a lot to consider. It taught me there’s a story to most things, and it kind of filled me with wonder. The novelist Frederick Barthelme makes a similar statement, citing a rotisserie chicken as inspiration for his turn to more realistic, observational fiction. His interests, he writes, became “the mundane” and “ordinary people in plain circumstances,” which is another way of saying daily moments.
Your question was about stillness, which is a theme woven all throughout Water~Stone Review, Volume 25. As I take it, the theme of “How Quiet Burns” suggests our longing for a world less cluttered by noise and distraction. In her introduction to the issue, Meghan Maloney-Vinz writes about the greater awareness we might find “if we rest for a moment without a device telling us where to turn and how to listen.” So yeah, there’s so much texture in the world, but it takes some effort and stillness to appreciate it.
What writers inspire or influence your work? Who are some authors you enjoy?
“People in Cars Outside the Coin Laundry” is flash writing, and no one in that field compares to Lydia Davis. I wouldn’t even count her as an influence, because she’s entirely inimitable. Then there’s the power and precision of Mary Robison, whose novels have all the compression of a great flash work. Among my favorite contemporary poets is Glenn Shaheen, and his flash fiction “Interference” (in the collection Carnivalia) is a great example of wonder, concreteness, and ephemeral thought. And finally, the translator and prose poet Gary Young crafts these blocks of prose that are as expressive and evocative as a good watercolor. His prose poetry (especially the collection That’s What I Thought) can be appreciated like a daily devotional, offering a model for how to pay closer attention.
Your story collection Golden Heart Parade came out two years ago. What other projects are you working on now?
I’ve been finding my way with short stories and personal essays for a while now. Lately I’ve turned my efforts to longer works. I just wrapped up what I hope will be my debut novel, a dark comedy in which two radio deejays search for a college athlete last seen in a blurry photograph of a tornado. That work is fairly plot-heavy. Now I’m drafting an existential farming novel, which is slower and more contemplative.
JOSEPH HOLT is the author of the story collection Golden Heart Parade. His writing has appeared in Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, and The Sun. He teaches a class on book review at Catapult, and he’s part of the MFA faculty at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
In the Field: Conversations with our Contributors—Interview with Jose Hernandez Diaz
In the Field: Conversations with our Contributors—Interview with Jose Hernandez Diaz
Your poem, “Ni de aquí, ni de allá: ni de la pinche luna,” speaks to cultural rejection, this difficult place of trying to find yourself while being caught between two cultures. What was the inspiration behind this poem? How did it come to be?
The inspiration is daily life as a first-gen Mexican American. Many times I’ve felt not Mexican enough for Mexicans and not American enough for Americans. I think it is something many folks who come from dual backgrounds can relate to. In fact, my forthcoming book is titled, “Bad Mexican, Bad American.” Eva Longoria famously said, “I’m not 50% Mexican and 50% American. I’m 100% Mexican and 100% American at the same time.”
I love poems that use multiple languages, like this one. Can you talk about the juxtaposition of the title being in Spanish and the poem being in English? What other poems have you written that use more than one language?
It’s just the way it came out. I think it is predominantly in English because it is my dominant language. But I am working on improving my Spanish by reading Spanish language poetry and singing along to Spanish language music (with the lyrics googled in front of me lol) as well.
I have written other poems with Spanish words but most of my poems are around 90 percent English. Growing up I would speak English to my parents as a kid when they would speak Spanish to me. Then, my parents both learned English and we all spoke a mixture but mostly English. Now, as I’ve grown to appreciate Spanish more I am trying to reconnect with Spanish. I have even begun working on translating some of my poems into Spanish. It isn’t easy, like English is for me, but I am noticing improvement which is promising and encouraging.
On the Poetry Foundation website, you mention that Russell Edson is one of the writers who inspires you. What other writers inspire or influence your work? Who are some authors you enjoy?
Some favorites: Ada Limón, Alberto Rios, Diane Seuss, Harryette Mullen, David Hernandez, Claudia Rankine, Ray Gonzalez, James Tate, Eduardo C. Corral, Terrance Hayes, Victoria Chang, Felicia Zamora, Sabrina Orah Mark, Marosa Di Giorgio.
You have a chapbook, The Fire Eater, with Texas Review Press, that just came out a few years ago in 2020. What are you working on now?
I also have a full collection coming out early next year with Acre Books: “Bad Mexican, Bad American.” I have another full collection coming out early 2025 with Sundress Publications: “The Parachutist.” Additionally, I have two full length manuscripts which are being read by potential publishers. I’ve been busy with writing but now [I’m] looking for more balance. I have also been teaching workshops with places like The Writer’s Center in DC, Hugo House, Lighthouse Writers Workshop to name a few.
In your beautiful poem Pan Dulce, you let us peek into your writing process a little with the ending of the poem. Can you share a bit more about your process? You write both verse and prose poetry; do you have a preference? When you begin a new project, do you know what form it’s going to be in, or does it develop along the way? How do you decide which form to set the poem in, or does the poem choose it?
Many of my linear verse poems are based on my reality or past as a first-gen low-income Mexican American growing up in Southeast Los Angeles and Northern Orange County. My prose poems tend to be surreal, absurdist and/or infused with Mexican and Mexican imagery or literary and cultural references.
JOSE HERNANDEZ DIAZ is a 2017 NEA Poetry fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020). His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Huizache, The Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, The Nation, POETRY, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He teaches creative writing online and serve as a guest editor for Frontier Poetry.
This Far North by Jason Tandon, Reviewed by Robyn Earhart
This Far North by Jason Tandon, Reviewed by Robyn Earhart
This Far North Jason Tandon Black Lawrence Press 2023 ISBN: 978-1-62557-048-2 83 pages
In Jason Tandon’s fifth collection of poetry This Far North, Tandon’s stripped down, bare bones, minimalist writing style poignantly enriches his philosophical musings on life. This Far North is partitioned into three sweeping movements that each contain a single poem titled “Poem.” As pillars in these sections, these three self-titled poems highlight repetitions strumming throughout the collection on families or collective units, childhood and childlike wonder, looking outward, being prepared and determination.
From the second “Poem” he writes,
When I stop moving this pencil across the paper—
mice
scratching in the attic.
Tandon implores the reader to forego self-centered thinking: This world is not about you; you are a mere fraction of what encapsulates the world. Just because you stop something, doesn’t mean the world does too.
Similar to his previous collection The Actual World, Tandon often brings the reader into his mind at work as the Poet, another way in which he creates multi-dimension in his writing. From “I Came Here” he states,
I came here to write a poem and all I can do is look at the beam of a solstice moon lying across the lake.
In “Not Writing” which he credits to a poem of the same title written by the illustrious Jane Kenyon, Tandon finds community in the solitary act of writing. Using an architectural space as the centering place (a wasp nest/home in Kenyon’s, “our lone / delinquent dock” in Tandon’s), Tandon watches as men wearing waders in a churning body of water secure the dock for safe passage. By sharing these glimmers of the writing process with plentiful and ripe symbolism, he delivers an extraordinary gift to readers in producing a poem from distraction. His way of folding readers into the writer’s life isn’t meta, rather Tandon is providing a gentle reminder that the eye and the mind don’t always agree with what the heart wants. At times it is necessary to pivot from set intentions. We must place trust in ourselves and be open to new ways of seeing.
A reflective modality is par for the course in This Far North where Tandon’s brief and lyrical meditations create riveting connections to elements of life’s existence. The titles of poems in this collection position the reader in proximal distance to the speaker serving as makers for where the speaker is, what the speaker is doing, what the speaker sees. With delightful precision, poems quickly shift from allegiance of the speaker’s personal distance to a more radically universal approach, something akin to a spiritual understanding. From “Sunrise, Five Below” the question of future-based speculation (“What do you want to be / when you grow up?”) conjures an outwardly perspective:
The frozen tracks of snowshoes heading into the spruce.
If the trace of one’s foot is impermanent, then rendering them frozen creates a semi-impermanence. Leading them outward to a forest disrupts their connections to time and space. In Tandon’s collection, brevity allows for the reader to slip in and slip out. A sensorial snapshot, melodious fragmentations, brief moments captured for posterity.
In Loons,” Tandon considers the grace we deserve,
Why is it such a pleasure when they dive to scan the surface for where they might reappear and be wrong everytime?
Writing, children and parents, the natural elements of changing seasons are all threaded throughout the collection and crafted into richly construed images. To go north represents a cardinal direction, a symbol of the passage of time based around the Earth rotating on its axis. Like the rising sun swelling and expanding, so to do Tandon’s poetic representations of what it means when men dismiss childish folklore, or to imagine the physical limitations pressed upon their children in times of horrific terrorist acts. What changes become of our understanding, to our interpretations of the most banal, and the most shocking, when the veil is lifted?
Sometimes it’s the smallest of creatures, the most seemingly simplest of minds that can make us understand. In the third “Poem,” Tandon writes,
Each time the chipmunk scurries from under the deck to a hole in the yard it carries a nut the size of its head between its paws.
Sometimes it takes a chipmunk hoarding a cache of food for winter to help us understand our place within humanity. To be ready. That small things create big things. That one impossible feat can make a difference in the world.
Don’t take for granted the minimalist appearance of This Far North. These poems in Jason Tandon’s collection are timeless and prodigious with a thundering, spiritual stirring of heart and mind.
Robyn Earhart‘s work has appeared in Barren Magazine, Columbia Journal, and the Under Review where she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with her husband and pets.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Tara Westmor
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Tara Westmor
The following interview was conducted between contributor Tara Westmor and assistant poetry editor Larissa Larson.
Your poem “Mother, Ankle Deep” in Volume 25 focuses on the cultural and natural definitions of gender and how this perpetuates throughout generations such as mothers to daughters. What was the seed of inception for this poem? How did this idea come to fruition?
Like many poems, this one started as a much worse draft and lived in a folder on my desktop for years. The poem was always about my mother, my sister, and me. My poor mother (of 6 children!) has had to rescue more than one child from drowning. When she revisits the stories of our childhood, she mimes how she held us, rocking back and forth. In the reenactment, she smiles and laughs at herself, acting maybe. But you can see the fear there. The re-awakening of her terror. It wasn’t until later when I became deeply invested in gender theory and feminist critiques of the sciences, knowledge production, and environmentalism that I spun a poem into what it is now. I feel these are not unrelated: theory and experience. There is something about gendered trauma that gets passed down from mother to daughter. In my poem, I attempt to process this.
Let’s talk about this poem’s craft, as it is so thoughtful. The form for “Mother, Ankle Deep” is so unique, especially its fragmentation. The use of slash marks, six sections, the jumps in time, broken language, even the menagerie of images perpetuate this division throughout the piece. Talk me through the creative process of this poem’s form and how you feel as an artist it amplifies the poem’s content?
This is one of those poems that has had a long evolution in form. I don’t remember why I chose to use the slashes, but I do remember the feeling. The “Ah hah!” moment of the pieces falling into place. With the slashes, this poem began to take the shape of a river where the language broke itself under the ripples in the form. Once that piece was in place, images cropped up: “heavy / coins / rubbish / a lure.” Items you could find under the river’s surface. There are some instances, I find, when the form begins to write the finishing touches of a poem. This was one of those instances.
You use a quote from Sherry B. Ortner’s essay “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” As mentioned in the earlier question, your poem really tackles gender roles in culture, specifically a woman’s, and how it is connected to nature. I would love to hear you expand on why you used this particular quote from Ortner’s almost 20-page essay, and how her work is in conversation with yours.
In her essay, written in 1972, Ortner argues that, as women, we see ourselves as “one with nature.” The patriarchal social landscape paints humanity as separate from nature. The patriarchal legacies of the sciences like to imagine the natural world is a resource we can harness. Women’s ability to give birth and nurture our young is often seen as a natural process that parallels our lived experiences with other living, natural, beings. This is not innately problematic; however, by highlighting the metaphors both men and women use to embolden or celebrate women’s bodies, we are ultimately marking ourselves as subordinate to men. According to Ortner, men are “cultural” beings rather than natural ones. They innovate, dictate, govern, conquer, etc. Setting themselves apart from nature sets them higher than nature, or rather, men set nature as subordinate to them. In 1996, Ortner doubles down in a follow-up article called “So, Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?” (Although she does suggest her arguments are not always universal).
I don’t disagree with Ortner, but I do think it’s worth noting the fragility of “culture,” or rather, the fragility of male domination. A river can be dammed. A river can maim. But neither is what rivers are meant to do. As women, we can be powerful, but I think it might be more of an imperative to simply say, as women, we can just be. The mother of this poem passed on her fear, of water and of men, as well as her ferocity to upend the status quo to her daughters. This poem attempts to demonstrate how we view ourselves in the wake of inherited legacies of female disempowerment. Here, I attempt to unveil this and wade in.
In “Mother, Ankle Deep” there is a strong metaphor of the mother’s body being a body of water, specifically a river. Her body is comforting and natural to her children, but her body also swallows up man-made items like rubbish, coins, lures, even male bodies. I’m interested in your opinion on gendered bodies and their symbology in culture and nature. If you had to pick a metaphor for your body, what would you be? 
Sherry Ortner wasn’t wrong. Women’s bodies are symbols for our environment in literature but also in everyday life. Mother earth. Goddess of hearth and home. Fertility. Domesticity. Innocence. And when we are not these, we are deviant, serpentine, whore. The biblical Eve is a great example of the literary woman. She is innocent and divine, but when she grasps at knowledge, she is punished.
I have attempted to get away from this and make different metaphors of my body. There are a few poems in my collection-in-progress where my body is a building. In others, my body is the Wright Flyer. But this also plays into gendered ideologies. If my body is a cultural artifact, then men have made me. Although this isn’t entirely untrue (we are living in the wake of patriarchal legacies), it certainly isn’t empowering. This poem looks (maybe desperately) for a way to complicate how we think about our bodies.
Inheritance has been on my mind recently. Especially while reading your poem, it makes me question what is naturally passed down from generation to generation and what is derived through culture, man-made constructs, and systemic roles we fall into as a society. I’m curious to hear your take on inheritance, more specifically the relationship from mother to daughter that is described in your poem
I’m thinking now about what we inherit biologically versus culturally: eye color (biological), property (cultural), inevitable climate disaster (cultural), trauma (both biological and cultural). I am also thinking about mental illness, and how depression is often passed down matriarchically (biological and cultural?). I hope this poem tows the line between inherited depression, but also inherited world views. The mother in this poem, and my mother in real life, is so wise, and generous, and hurt, to see what she has passed down to her children.
I know you are currently pursuing your PhD in Anthropology at the University of California; congratulations! Anthropology seems to be such a broad, yet multifaceted field focusing on human behavior, biology, culture, society, and linguistics—past and present. What specific aspects draw you to anthropology, and how do you incorporate those fascinations into your writing?
This is such a lovely and refreshing question. Usually, I am getting asked the very same from anthropologists. That is to say: “Why poetry?” I think we use both genres to answer the same questions. Although poetry has a significantly longer legacy, the institutionalization of both disciplines have deep colonial roots but both have potentials to be liberatory.
In truth, I had wanted to be an anthropologist since I was in third grade. Although I have since stopped wanting to find Atlantis. I began writing poems at around the same time, albeit very poor ones. Anthropology promised answers to the same questions that poetry did. Today, I’m always on a soapbox about pairing ethnographic texts with poetry texts. I feel there is something missing in academic language (trust? the ephemeral? the unknown?) that is abundant in poetry.
I feel more and more social sciences and humanities folks should study creative writing and craft. And I think poets who are interested in research should take a research methods or ethics class. Ultimately, I wonder if the binarisms of university structuring hold us back from radical interdisciplinary practice. Here, I keep turning to the words of the late anthropologist and poet, Miles Richardson who lamented, “So have we returned, in our turning, back to the familiar dichotomy of art versus science? To such a question, let us affirm, ‘Ring out, wild, emphatic no’s, and let the dichotomy die’” (1994, 82-83). Here I am on the soapbox again, but the dramatics are warranted.
Who or what is inspiring you these days? Are there writers or books that have impacted your work or art recently?
I’m coming up to my qualifying exams, and so have not stepped away from anthropology theory in quite some time. Because of this, I have found myself sobbing over the prose of theorists: Theodore Adorno, Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway. I “snuck” Virginia Woolf, and several Documentary Poets into my reading list. My summer reading list is filled with fiction and poetry that I have had to put off. My brilliant poetry colleague, Jill Mceldowney just released her beautiful debut poetry collection, Otherlight. Fellow anthropoet, Nomi Stone along with Luke Hankins, published a beautiful anthology about Eve called Between Paradise and Earth (which contains brilliant work from another poetry colleague, Brooke Sahni). I want to revisit the entire discography of Ada Limón. This summer will be a delight of poetry and the occasional theoretical text on anthropology and the New Materialism movement.
What projects are you working on now?
I’m currently working on two projects, simultaneously. First, my own research is in collaboration with poetry communities and the creative economies in Vietnam. I study the shift in Vietnamese poetics from a national tool for state formation to a Cultural and Creative Industry (CCI) practice. Here, I look at Vietnamese poetry as a lens for how culture gets co-opted into capitalism schemas, where in the cultural and creative sectors, “innovation” has not been used to discuss the arts.
Second, I am also finalizing my own poetry manuscript (which is awaiting submittable responses now!) about inheritance, and history, and my mother, the beloved. Currently titled, Interview Questions for the Beloved, this collection questions the ways in which the early American, industrial Midwest inflicts a patriarchal nostalgia onto the folks who live there and the folks who “make it out.”
I’m always writing poems. And although it’s difficult to do in the midst of reading theory and doing research, I continue writing despite. My good friend, a fiction writer, and I share each other’s work weekly. I shove poems into anthropology writing assignments every chance I get. And I find my students engage with material, on any subject, much better when I have a good poem to guide them through it.
Tara Westmor is an anthropologist poet raised in Dayton, Ohio. She received her MFA in poetry from New Mexico State University and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of California, Riverside. She has work published and forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, The Greensboro Review, Hunger Mountain, Prairie Schooner, Arts & Letters, Sink Review, and elsewhere.