12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jake Fournier

Jake Fournier is a firefighter based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He teaches in the graduate program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. His book, Punishment Bag, is available from the University of New Mexico Press.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Punishment Bag changed my life in that it gave me something to do—or to aspire to do—for a long time. Having it growing somewhere in the background allowed me to describe myself as a poet. There’s a persona poem in the book about a first responder who recovers a suicide from a cesspool. I wrote it when I was an academic and had spent almost the whole of my professional life teaching language and literature. Now I’m a structural firefighter. Did the poem change my life?

My most recent work is green, stolonic—kudzu-like—and my previous work is sectile and cool to the touch.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Poems are usually shorter, so if you waste a lot of time wrestling with yourself and questioning what writing is or whether it’s even advisable, I think it tends to just kind of win out over time. I’m not a huge fan of the genre divisions. I think what I write next will be some big combination of all these things.
 
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?

Yes!

4 - Where does a poem 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?

They almost always begin with the first line, but I can think of at least one exception. This makes me think I ought to start more in the middle. Starting at the end seems like a bad idea, though I know John Irving writes that way. When it comes to writing, I don’t like to do anything too exclusively, even if it works.

I guess the scare quotes around “book” in the question are supposed to distance the idea of a project that an author might have starting out from the object that ends up being produced and distributed in the world, but I kind of prefer to imagine that some ancient sophist poses the question while doubting the very existence of books. These so-called “books” your purport to believe in. That’s kind of how it feels to me, having rarified them so much with my obsession.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? 

A few poems I’ve written came from imagining I had an audience. One called “Edible Arrangement” in my book and another called “What makes it a poem?” that I wrote after the book was done. As a reading attendee I’m always waiting for the reading to be over so I can get to the fun part of talking and making jokes and having a few drinks. Readings are best as a pretext for hanging out. I enjoy giving them very much though. If I could chain people to the seats and make them listen to me all night I would.

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?

Not to be coy, but these seem like current questions. I think a lot of my poetry is asking what a poem is, trying to catch some fleeting glimpse of one of poetry’s contours. I guess there’s some organicism or naturalism behind my writing. I’m very interested in the question of what word comes next. Or, you know, should that be the last one.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think writers should write things, maybe even just in their heads. Ideally they’ll have some good intuitions about how it will ramify in “the world that is the world of all of us,” but that’s not necessary. Writers have to take on a lot that isn’t writing—teaching, child-rearing. They exercise a lot of judgement. That’s not really their social role as I see it. Even if a writer were just sitting in their own private version of a temple typing onto a ream of paper that fed immediately into a shredder, I think that would be good. I saw a very funny bogus and potentially even slightly offensive reel recently that features a Chinese sage with an English AI voiceover. The sage is saying “Is there a woman in your house who likes to sleep a lot? Don’t call her lazy! She is bringing good luck and fortune to the house. This is very hard work, so naturally she is tired and needs her rest.” That’s kind of how I see writers working globally.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Very few editors have seen anything profitable enough in my work to bother with it. Friends and my wife have done a lot pro bono. I listen very attentively, and I often change things, but really I just want them to tell me it’s perfect. I sort of wish I remembered everything I changed so I could get in there and change it back one day.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

My therapist told me about a really great deep tissue guy who lives on top the Sandia Mountains, and she advised me to get in touch with him. I was very skeptical that it could help, and the work he was doing was and is very painful, some kind of jujitsu-grip technique. I don’t really understand it, but it works. Find somebody like that.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?

For me, critical prose has mostly been a way to secure funds and benefits. The University of Chicago gave me an amazing fellowship that stipulated, you know, “finish your dissertation within the space of the year or you’ll be immediately ejected from the program.” That’s not verbatim, but that made it very easy to focus on criticism for a while! I like having the big degree too, that’s very appealing. I put the letters after my name on LinkedIn, and I have all the magazines address themselves to “Dr. Fournier.” And people at work still call me “doctor” or “doc” as a kind of joke every now and then. It can be very confusing for the patients.

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?

If I’m not at work I usually wake up and spend the first few hours of the day staring into my cell phone screen. I had a lot of debt and financial insecurity through my teens, 20s, and early 30s, so I’m basically obsessed with money. Now that I have some retirement savings, sometimes I’ll just go into my E-Trade account and refresh the page over and over watching the market values go up and down however many hundredths of a percentage point. If I’m at work, I make coffee for everyone at the station and then I go out into the bay and wash the trucks. I really like language learning, though I’m miserable at it, so I’ll usually put a Spanish audio lesson on a single Airpod, and I’ll scrub up the engine and the rescue repeating things like, En Argentina, hay una región vinícola muy conocida. Ayer, hice un recorrido por los viñedos.

I read this book recently called Living on Earth—it jumped out at me from the nonfiction table at the Strand on the Upper West Side, I think because it was what I was presently doing. Anyway, the author, Godfrey-Smith, talks a lot about the corpus callosum—the connection point between the two hemispheres of the brain. Apparently reading really enlarges this thing. He also talks about some subtle measurable differences in the brain activity and anatomy of people who read and write from right to left, and my routine, since I was even a very young child, has involved writing left to right. I’m thinking it could be good to start writing right to left. It’s just a matter of choosing the right language.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

My window and the birds outside, or sometimes I’ll write about the coffee on my desk. If the birds outside seem a little too boring, I have an Audubon Society Field Guide with all the really great birds in it. The boobies and stuff. If that doesn’t get you out of a funk, I don’t know what will.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Vanilla. My mother had a very acute sense of smell, and she loved vanilla. If I ever smell Vel soap again (they stopped making it) I’d be instantly transported to my mother’s bathroom. Also, Murphy’s Oil Soap.

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?

Leslie Marmon Silko has this great thing about how the plot of Ceremony is like a spider web, and Paula Gunn Allen has all this awesome stuff about the Lakota sacred hoop and what she calls a matrifocal worldview. Spiders scare me a little, and there’s black widows here in New Mexico, and brown recluses. Their bites cause a lot of damage, but the thing is they hardly ever bite people. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit this, but I even put out some chemical that’s supposed to kill them. We had a lot of spiders in our yard, and I like to lift weights out there, so I was worried I’d accidentally bother one when I was grabbing my BowFlex adjustable dumbbells, and it would bite me. I’m not going to do that anymore though. I hope they come back so I can learn more about how to write poems from them.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

This is the opposite of how this question probably means to be answered. It seems like it’s after some deep foundational influence, but, before my new Zen Soto practice—just sitting—I’m reading a few poems a day by Laura Kolbe from her book Little Pharma. I met Kolbe just before midnight on December 31^st, and then she was the first person I talked to in the new year. She’s a doctor—a medical doctor— an internist, and her poems are deeply inflected by her being a doctor without being reducible to that. Since I started firefighting, I’ve become a little worried that my poems are going to go, like, “Get the Narcan!—.4 migs for IM.” Her writing feels important to me now because it shows how much deeper and weirder it can be than that. Justin Cox is another very important writer to my life and work. He wrote a book, Stock Pond, that might be even better than looking out a window. I’m also one fourth of a poetry coterie called the Merry Company, also sometimes called the Gay Science. The other members—important to me in every way—are Chris Schlegel, Jess Laser, and Dan Poppick. I don’t know how I got in. They’re sort of like the SEAL Team Six of poetry.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

I’d like to get my paramedic license. I’m a basic, which just feels pretty lame when it comes to practicing medicine. I’d also like to run a 50-mile ultra.

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?

I’m thinking about maybe trying for a masters in linguistics or linguistic anthropology. A lot of my favorite critical writers are anthropologists by training—people like David Scott and David Graeber. All the Davids. And Ofelia Zepeda, who wrote one of my favorite poems of all time, is a linguist.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I don’t really see writing as being opposed to doing something else. Sometimes I wonder if writing is opposed to writing! I was just thinking how Siddhartha Gautama and Socrates never wrote anything at all. They were such great writers they didn’t have to.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I really liked Marty Supreme, but the last really great film I saw was On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, which was written and directed by Rungano Nyoni. It’s so good my wife was mad at me afterward just for being a man. I had a shelf with all the books I read in 2025 on it, but I dismantled it when I moved into my new office. It would have made answering this question a lot easier. I’ve read other great books since I read it, but I’m going to give Alvaro Enrigue’s You Dreamed of Empires as my answer here. A few years ago my old friend Rowland Yang sent me a book by Benjamin Labatut called When We Cease to Understand the World. That was a banger. I have an idea for a book I’d like to write that is right in between the two of them, and all about poetry!

20 - What are you currently working on?

Yesterday I repainted the room that was my office, and I’m busy working on getting it ready for the baby. My wife is due on March 30^th. I’ve also been putting a lot of research into what VR headset I want to get and what games I can bring to play while she’s laboring. She’s an ob/gyn and she tells me about all the awful things the FOBs do when their wives are delivering. FOB is “father of the baby.” She tells me all this stuff—people delivering with the TV on, families eating crab claws in the delivery room—and I’m like, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Katie Schmid, nowhere: poems

 

Some Boys of the Midwest
            After Ben Marcus

Boys court me. We leave the restaurant, where they sat uncomfortable and did not know where to put their elbows. Shyly they take my hand to help me into the car. Shyly they part the sea of empty Mountain Dew cans in the back seat and reach for me, leave their bites all over me. The boys are unwashed and smell like food—as if they have been lightly battered and fried in their own grease. The boys hold my hands in theirs until they begin to ache. The parking lot empties, leaving a vast ocean of tar under yellow light. It is five in the morning. A wild red fox streaks past the car, something wriggling in his mouth. Even in the dark, it is easy to tell who consumes who.

Lincoln, Nebraska poet Katie Schmid’s full-length debut is nowhere: poems (Albuquerque NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2021), a startling collection of poems around coming-of-age, sex and power, female agency and loss, including, as the back cover offers, “chronicling the pain that the speaker and her absent father endure during the years they are separated while he is in prison.” Hers are a sequence of dark, midwestern narratives around absence, emotional distance and old boyfriends, haunted by history and its impact, and a world experienced through the lens of such an incredibly large and early absence. “Because I survived,” she writes, to open the poem “Crown of Eyes,” “it became a story / I owed to anyone who asked.” Writing very much from the inside of a consideration of “fatherless girls and the bodies of women,” Schmid speaks bluntly of how the heart develops callouses from wear, and what in her world might be considered weakness, and what might be considered strength. She writes of the absence of a father, even after he returns, and the complications of that absence. She writes of myth and the hard lessons of real life, and the occasional conflict between the two; of exhaltation, exhaustion and a possible escape or salvation that never quite arrives. As the end of the two-page poem “A Nightmare Is a Body and / Your Father Gone” offers: “Body, your very composition is an absence / & lay you down to sleep in his T-shirts // & be now the child & be the father both / & hold your little self & hold the gonefather // at your center & make of it a timeless world: / throw up your firmament of eternal tears. // The lack at the heart of you is your making, the lack / at the heart of you is where you learn to make.”

She writes of loss and pregnancy, poems that move into the endless sadness of miscarriage. “It is wrong to want // the impossible,” she writes, towards the end of “The Island of Lost Things,” “to continue wanting, as if the wanting / is an action, and besides, the lost things are alive now, / as if the state of being lost // has breathed blood and health into their frames. / The nurse sounds the depths of my stomach / as if it were an ocean, // as if the island is hard to find, though I feel it / rise under my skin. In this moment before elation / or disaster, I’ve lived my whole life.” There is a hope her poems cling to, even despite herself, one that refuses to let go, despite all evidence; and perhaps this, beyond all else, is the thread that ties these narratives together, and allow them the possibility of not dragging her completely under.

Her poems have both narrative and emotional force, offering a cadence that rolls along with a cadence that unfolds at contemplative speeds, one that allows her thoughtful lyric the space it requires. The only moment I can catch otherwise is in the poem “All My Boyfriends Love / My Father the Best,” a piece that, however stunning, reads a bit truncated at the very end, almost as though the spacings were shunted for the sake of not having to move a line or two to the next page:

                                            […] I can see them squinting
            he's everything

they ever dreamed and a Jungian too—and I know
that love where you try so hard to get someone

to see you and it feels like you’ll never be let in
to the mysterious house that you know from distant

observation is the most beautiful house, that you know
from closest study        everything
but what it’s like to step inside

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jehanne Dubrow

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of four poetry collections, including most recently Red Army Red and Stateside (Northwestern UP, 2012 and 2010).  Her first book, The Hardship Post (2009), won the Three Candles Press Open Book Award, and her second collection From the Fever-World, won the Washington Writers' Publishing House Poetry Competition (2009).  In 2015, University of New Mexico Press will publish her fifth book of poems, The Arranged Marriage. She has been a recipient of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Towson University Prize for Literature, an Individual Artist's Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship and Howard Nemerov Poetry Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and a Sosland Foundation Fellowship from the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her poetry, creative nonfiction, and book reviews have appeared in The New Republic, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, and on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. She serves as the Director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House and is an Associate Professor in creative writing at Washington College, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I think, like many poets, I found that I was able to turn my attention to new work once that first collection had found a home. I could simply put those early poems behind me and move on.

Each one of my books has a distinct narrative and, as a result, a distinct form (yes, I’m talking about the old saw of form mirroring content). So, for instance, although I’m often described as a poet who works in traditional forms, my next book—The Arranged Marriage—is a linked sequence of prose poems.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I drafted my first poem when I was eleven-years-old and dabbled in poetry from then on. When I was 22, I went through a really sad break-up (with the man who eventually became my husband), and that’s when I began to write poems more seriously. I wrote an Elizabethan sonnet everyday for a year and, when I was 23, I called my parents and told them, “I’m going to be a poet. I’m going to go to graduate school to get something called an ‘MFA.’”

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 really depends on the project and the poem. In general, I find that the early poems in a manuscript come quickly, in part because they access the easiest or most obvious observations about their subject matter. The later poems take longer but are frequently more interesting because they have to move beyond the undemanding metaphors and images toward more nuanced conclusions.

4 - Where does a poem 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?
My poems frequently begin with sound. I’ll hear, in my head, a line that delights me—even if I don’t understand its logic or its narrative impulse—and then follow the music toward meaning.

The poems in my last few collections (Stateside, Red Army Red, The Arranged Marriage) presented themselves to me as books almost immediately. I wrote a few poems and could tell that they belonged to larger narratives, full-length collections whose stories I wanted to tell.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I started out in the theater. So, I’m very comfortable giving readings and enjoy the transition between page and stage. That said, I don’t view readings as a part of my writing process; the poems an audience loves are often not one’s best work, and it’s unwise to use audience response as a way to gauge a poem’s significance or accomplishment.

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’m interested in the ways poems function both as discrete units and as intersecting, overlapping texts in the metanarrative of a book. They’re particles and waves. I believe in mimesis and am always trying to understand more fully the way form mirrors content and content form.

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 spent a large portion of my childhood in Communist-era Poland, a place where writers and other artists thought very deeply about their role in and duty to the larger culture. Sometimes these kinds of thoughts energized their work but, in the last days of the Cold War, as it became clear that soon the old enemy would be gone or toppled, these kinds of concerns paralyzed many in the intelligentsia.

In general, I try not to reflect to frequently on these sorts of questions, because I find them distracting. My work is most successful when it resides in the specific, the realm of taste and touch and smell and sound and sight. Phrases like “the current role” and “larger culture” are anything but concrete or physical.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I love working with editors. I like when editors asked me to explain or justify my choices. When we can articulate our decisions as writers—why we’ve picked this word and not another, why we’ve broken the line here and not here—that’s when we know our work is rigorous, that it’s built both on sound and on good sense.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
It’s not a piece of advice, but I appreciate that so many poets speak about “the craft of writing.” In another life, I would have gone to art school to study textiles and would have become an art quilter. I like the idea that poems are things requiring our hands, our time, our labor. Like a quilt or a well-constructed walnut chair or a thrown clay pot, a poem can be both beautiful and useful. We apprentice ourselves to the craft. We bow our heads, acknowledging that we come from a long line of craftsmen who made many beautiful, useful things before us. 

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to creative non-fiction to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
There’s a reason so many poets also work in nonfiction; writing a poem has a lot in common with writing a lyrical essay or even a piece of critical prose. All of these texts can think associatively, can make interesting intellectual leaps, can bring together a first-person point of view and the intellect.

Genre-jumping is also a great way to avoid boredom.

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?
I write everyday: drafting, revising, editing, researching. I like to joke that I’m a shark; I have to keep swimming, or I’ll die. Sometimes I write in the morning, sometimes in the evening. But I always write.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I don’t believe in writer’s block. When one project isn’t working, I turn my attention to another. I always have several manuscripts in progress, and I have a big list of tricks or games that I use to keep the work moving. I love writing imitations. Ekphrasis also works well for me; just the act of description—describing a work of art—is a great technique for generating words and for turning my attention away from the kinds of anxieties that can so cripple a writer.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I love this question, because I just co-edited an anthology about fragrance, The Book of Scented Things: 100 Contemporary Poems about Perfume.

At the same time, this question is one I can’t answer. I’m the daughter of American diplomats and moved every three to four years, throughout my childhood and adolescence. I was born in Italy, and grew up in Yugoslavia, Zaire, Poland, Belgium, Austria, and the United States. Even though I’ve now lived on the Eastern Shore of Maryland for seven years, I wouldn’t call it home.

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?
One of the poetry collections I’m currently drafting is called Stories of the Great Operas, which centers on my father’s passion for opera. I’m learning that it’s really hard to write poems about music. In the past, I’ve frequently written about paintings and photography and food, lots of food (come to think of it, the kitchen table is probably the closest place I know to home).

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
American Jewish writers: Philip Roth, Emma Lazarus, Cynthia Ozick, Jonathan Safran Foer, Marilyn Hacker, Nathan Englander, Tillie Olsen, Anthony Hecht, Grace Paley, Howard Nemerov….

Also Holocaust studies:  Paul Celan, Saul Friedlander, Marian Hirsch, Ida Fink, Christopher Browning, W.G. Sebald, Charlotte Delbo, Primo Levi, Art Spiegelman, Jean Améry, Felman & Laub, Susan Gubar, Lawrence Langer… 

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I want to write a how-to book on the use of imagery in poems. I hope to write a collection of children’s poetry. I would like to write a novel or a book of linked short stories. I want to collaborate with a composer on a traditional, American musical.

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?
I was always torn between becoming a writer, an actor, and an artist. I’m grateful that I decided against a life in the theater. But I still love the visual arts and would have loved to have studied graphic design, which I still dabble in, as part of my work directing the Rose O’Neill Literary House and overseeing the Literary House Press.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I don’t know. Maybe it all goes back to the year I turned 22 and that sad break-up. Maybe, at the time, poems were a more accessible outlet for my hurt than was the stage or the artist’s studio.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I recently reread Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and thought it was every bit as wonderful as I remembered it to be. The other night, I found myself watching The Lives of Others, for the third or fourth time, and felt grateful again for the fact that not every movie is Transformers or The Fast and the Furious.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m working on two books of poems, Stories of the Great Operas and Dots and Dashes. I’m also drafting a series of essays—I call them “meditative close readings”—about Philip Larkin. And I’m co-editing a new anthology, Still Life with Poem: 100 Natures Mortes in Verse.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;