Gillian Cummings is the author
of The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter,
selected by John Yau as the winner of the 2018 Colorado Prize for Poetry (The
Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University, 2018) and MyDim Aviary, winner of the 2015 Hudson Prize (Black
Lawrence Press, 2016). She has also written three chapbooks: Ophelia (dancing girl press, 2016), Petals as an Offering in Darkness (Finishing Line
Press, 2014), and Spirits of the Humid Cloud (dancing girl press, 2012). Her
poems have appeared in Boulevard, the Cincinnati Review, Colorado
Review, Denver Quarterly, the Laurel Review, the Massachusetts
Review, Quarterly West, Verse Daily, and
others. A graduate of Stony Brook University and of Sarah Lawrence
College’s MFA program, she was awarded the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial
Fund Poetry Prize in 2008. Cummings lives in Westchester County, New York.
1 - How did your
first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare
to your previous? How does it feel different?
When
my first book was published, I was very scared. I know that’s probably the
opposite of what you’re supposed to feel, but that is the truth. The poems in My Dim Aviary were persona poems written
in an attempt to heal from sexual trauma. But to write them, I pretended to be
someone I wasn’t. Now that my second book, The
Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, is in the world, I feel happy about it. It
feels more like the “me” I know.
2 - How did you come to poetry first,
as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
When I was a
freshman in college, majoring in English, I became friends with someone who was
a poet. I had always loved writing stories as a child, and I’d turned to
journaling sometime later, but even as an English major it didn’t occur to me
that you could be an actual living poet. My friend opened my eyes to this
possibility by recommending books by contemporary poets and showing me his own
drafts of poems. Then I decided to try it myself. My first poems were awkward
and unoriginal, but they were a start.
3 - How long does it take to start
any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is
it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape,
or does your work come out of copious notes?
It’s a very
spontaneous process with me. I’ll find something in the world that corresponds
with a feeling I have inside, and I’ll use that image or sound or concept to
start writing a poem—the “objective correlative”. Most often, when poems have
come to me, they’ve come through a voice that starts speaking in my mind. It’s
a different sounding voice than my usual worried-thoughts voice, because it
speaks more rhythmically and slowly. When I hear that voice, I try to stop
everything and get the words down. That’s the first draft. And while some poems
I’ve written come out being close to finished in the first draft, others need
many, many drafts, and yet countless others I simply abandon at some stage. The
poem in The Owl that came out nearly
perfect on first try was “When World Is Whale.” And “Cloud of Ancient, Cloud of
Old, Cloud of Platinum, Cloud of Gold,” which took the most drafts, isn’t even
in the collection, because it became too difficult to get right, though it was
published at one point in Whiskey Island.
4 - Where does a poem or work of
prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up
combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from
the very beginning?
After my MFA at
Sarah Lawrence, where I was just writing single poems and getting them to
cohere became a problem, I began working on “project books.” My Dim Aviary was a project book, almost
a novella in prose poems, and this new book, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, began as a series of sonnets in third
person, all on the similar theme of loss and suicidal depression.
5 - Are public readings part of or
counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing
readings?
I couldn’t write if
I thought about having to read what I was writing to an audience. I’m very shy.
The performer “Gillian” is not the same as the “Gillian” writing the poems,
though when I give a reading, the audience can still sense, I think, this
shyness that is so much of who I am. And when I give a reading, if it goes
well, I do feel tremendous gratitude.
6 - Do you have
any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you
trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions
are?
I
think that it’s important for writers to help foster acceptance of all people
for who they are, without passing negative judgment due to race, religion,
ethnicity, sexual identity, or abilty / disablity. In The Owl, I try to present the topic of mental illness in a way that
sheds light on its potential to expand limited notions of how a person should
feel and be. I try to say that if you feel like someone who “wants to die and
does / not know…” essentially why you feel this way, feeling like this is okay,
too, it’s human. I purposefully didn’t tell a recovery story, because I believe
that the insistence upon so-called “recovery” in our society actually
perpetuates the problem of stigma. This is a question that I am concerned with
as a person with Bipolar 1 and PTSD.
7 – What do you
see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have
one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I
don’t write political poetry, so I guess this is a hard question for me. I
think that those writers who are dealing with the bigger issues in their works—such
as racial injustice, rape culture, poverty and homelessness, and ecocide—are
doing the important work. But I think it’s also okay to “write what you know.”
And what I know is mental illness and the devastations of trauma, so I start
from there.
8 - Do you find the process of
working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential.
Definitely essential. My poet-friends, my teachers, and editors are always much
smarter about my own work than I am.
9 - What is the
best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
My
late Zen teacher, Susan Jion Postal, once gave me a little printout of a saying
by Lin Yutang. It goes like this:
“Besides the noble art of getting things
done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life
consists in the elimination of the nonessentials. Awareness of one’s true place
in life cannot be hurried or forced. Dialogue with oneself that leads to
awareness and action must come of its own.”
10 - How easy
has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction to visual art)?
What do you see as the appeal?
Everything
happens organically. With writing especially. I don’t choose what I write about
or in which form / genre the writing comes. I just hear words and let them
guide me. Most times what begins is poetry, but once I heard a novel beginning…
With visual art, well, I draw as a hobby, as a form of relaxation. When I draw,
I have to concentrate so hard on the still life object, almost always a plant,
that there isn’t much room in my mind for words. No words. A freedom from them.
I need that for balance. And so drawing has become an integral part of keeping
me sane and keeping me writing. And I can draw when I feel blocked with
writing, and then at least I feel I am still creating.
11 - What kind
of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a
typical day (for you) begin?
When
I write poetry, I write whenever I feel inspired. I don’t follow a routine with
poetry. I can’t. When I am working on fiction, I wake up in the morning, have a
cup of tea with honey, and—when I am awake enough—start writing wherever it was
I left off.
12 - When your
writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better
word) inspiration?
Other
writers. Reading. But I have to say that I went into a daylong coma during the
time I was writing The Owl Was a Baker’s
Daughter, and for a long time after the coma reading became really
difficult. I would look at a page of writing and the words wouldn’t form
meaningful sentences. So when reading failed me, it helped to go for walks in
the woods for inspiration or to museums to look at great art.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of
home?
Parrot feathers
and—not that these go together—baked apples.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that
books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work,
whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I go for walks in
the woods all the time, and sometimes I hear poems forming as I’m walking… My
husband, Rich Panish, has for the past eight years dedicated his life to
composing music, and when you share your life with a composer, music becomes a
very big part of it. He has written three albums so far and is now at a stage
where the first one is being recorded. This is an album we collaborated on. I
wanted to remain invisible and let the work be all his, but he is insisting that
he give me credit as co-composer… And then visual art. Visual art is a huge
influence. I love going to museums and galleries. I keep art books scattered
all over the coffee table. My living room, because I live in a small space, is
half art studio, and feels like the heart of our home to me. It’s where our
stereo speakers are. It’s where we go after our parrot falls asleep at night.
15 - What other
writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of
your work?
When
I was writing The Owl Was a Baker’s
Daughter, I read Hamlet over and
over, and King Lear, and
Shakespeare’s sonnets. I read the sonnets of Keats and Hopkins. I read
Dickinson and Plath. And Unica Zürn’s two novels (I also loved looking at her
ink drawings, which were created in an asylum). Also Gérard de Nerval’s Aurelia. And lots of contemporary poets,
including but not limited to the recently deceased Lucie Brock-Broido, and
living poets Cynthia Cruz, Allison Benis White, Larissa Szporluk, Jennifer Militello,
Jennifer Chang, Brenda Shaughnessy, Joanna Klink, Rachel Eliza Griffiths,
Kristy Bowen, Blueberry Elizabeth Morningsnow, Jennifer S. Cheng… The list
could go on. And I am purposefully naming only the women poets I read, because
I wanted the collection to sound very feminine—and even feminist, though in a
quiet way.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to
travel to Norway to see the Western fjords, the stave churches, and the Edvard
Munch museum in Oslo. I would like to do more collaborative work with other
artists—I’d love to put together an artist’s book or two with someone else’s
artwork and my poems. I would like to co-author, with my husband, a book of
critical theory about the mental health recovery system. And I’d like to do
more to help others who are suffering.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it
be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you
not been a writer?
If I could choose
another career and go back in time, I would have liked to have been a botanical
illustrator.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Fate, I guess. This
question might be beyond me to explain. It felt like something was pulling me.
I was writing in my spare time and working in libraries as a part-time clerk,
and I was sad that my work wasn’t really being picked up by magazines, so I
went for an MFA at the age of thirty-six, which is late, I know. After
graduating, I had a breakdown and became suicidal, not because of writing but
because of a great loss in my life. The losses kept happening, one after the
other after the other. And I chose to write through them, because what else
could I do? Those poems became The Owl
Was a Baker’s Daughter.
19 - What was
the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I
recently read GennaRose Nethercott’s The Lumberjack’s Dove, which is a beautiful fairytale / folktale in the form of
one long poem, an extended meditation, also on loss, in this case the loss of a
hand that turns into a dove and what that can mean and not mean. Her book left
me wanting to read more and more books of poetry that incorporate fairytales—I
always love when a book opens a door to other works.
Film—that’s
hard. I don’t own a television and don’t watch movies that often. I did love
Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson. I also loved
a French / Russian film called Polina,
about a dancer trying to find her way in the world and struggling.
20 - What are
you currently working on?
I’ve
finished the first draft of a novel about a five-year-old girl named Lily who
lives with her grandparents and doesn’t know why she doesn’t have a mother. I’m
struggling with it now, because I don’t know how to edit fiction so well... I’ve
also been writing new poems of two kinds, poems about the landscape of Iceland,
and some new poems that are the saddest works I’ve ever written, but I can’t
say much about them yet because they are too new.
